Seriously, articles like this are just clickbait.

They also ignore all sorts of usecases.

Like for a desktop monitor, 4k is extremely noticeable vs even 1440P or 1080P/2k

Unless you're sitting very far away, the sharpness of text and therefore amount of readable information you can fit on the screen changes dramatically.

So, a 55-inch TV, which is pretty much the smallest 4k TV you could get when they were new, has benefits over 1080p at a distance of 7.5 feet... how far away do people watch their TVs from? Am I weird?

And at the size of computer monitors, for the distance they are from your face, they would always have full benefit on this chart. And even working into 8k a decent amount.

And that's only for people with typical vision, for people with above-average acuity, the benefits would start further away.

But yeah, for VR for sure, since having an 8k screen there would directly determine how far away a 4k flat screen can be properly re-created. If your headset is only 4k, a 4k flat screen in VR is only worth it when it takes up most of your field of view. That's how I have mine set up, but I would imagine most people would prefer it to be half the size or twice the distance away, or a combination.

So 8k screens in VR will be very relevant for augmented reality, since performance costs there are pretty low anyway. And still convey benefits if you are running actual VR games at half the physical panel resolution due to performance demand being too high otherwise. You get some relatively free upscaling then. Won't look as good as native 8k, but benefits a bit anyway.

There is also fixed and dynamic foveated rendering to think about, with an 8k screen, even running only 10% of it at that resolution and 20% at 4k, 30% at 1080p, and the remaining 40% at 540p, even with the overhead of so many foveation steps, you'll get a notable reduction in performance cost. Fixed foveated would likely need to lean higher towards bigger percentages of higher res, but has the performance advantage of not having to move around at all from frame to frame. Can benefit from more pre-planning and optimization.

There's a giant TV at my gym that is mounted right in front of some of the equipment, so my face is inches away. It must have some insane resolution because everything is still as sharp as a standard LCD panel.

8K would probably be really good for large computer monitors, due to viewing distances. It would be really taxing on the hardware if you were using it for gaming, but reasonable for tasks that aren't graphically intense.

Computer monitors (for productivity tasks) are a little different though in that you are looking at section of the screen rather than the screen as a whole as one might with video. So having extra screen real estate can be rather valuable.

The counterpoint is that if you're sitting that close to a big TV, it's going to fill your field of view to an uncomfortable degree.

4k and higher is for small screens close up (desktop monitor), or very large screens in dedicated home theater spaces. The kind that would only fit in a McMansion, anyway.

People are legit sitting 15+ feet away and thinking a 55 inch TV is good enough... Optimal viewing angles for most reasonably sized rooms require a 100+ inch TV and 4k or better.

Good to know that pretty much anything looks fine on my TV, at typical viewing distances.

Would be a more useful graph if the y axis cut off at 10, less than a quarter of what it plots.

Not sure what universe where discussing the merits of 480p at 45 ft is relevant, but it ain't this one. If I'm sitting 8 ft away from my TV, I will notice the difference if my screen is over 60 inches, which is where a vast majority of consumers operate.

How many feet away is a computer monitor?

Or a 2-4 person home theater distance that has good fov fill?