It's not. Finding the ceiling is always going to involve overshooting the ceiling and then walking back from there. It sounds as though you're not willing to consider even the possibility that this may be the effective end of progress for this combination of technology and use case, at least for values of "progress" that involve increasing resolution, rather than values that involve decreasing cost.
Or rather it sounds as someone misreading me again as asking for "progress" when I'm just asking not to skimp over on what was already offered 10 years ago and practically everyone else still offers today.
The Steam Hardware Survey shows that 1920x1080 is still the majority resolution, and that's among an audience that's inordinately populated by technological enthusiasts. The fact that people are seemingly dead-set on sticking to 1920x1080 despite--as you point out--the availability of alternatives only further strengthens the argument that the majority of consumers just don't particularly value higher resolutions.
Note that I game at 1080p (or worse), even on my setup with dual 4k monitors (because it is also over 10 years old), so neither shows up on steam survey as anything other than 1080p (which also puts dual setups at a different category). Gaming at 1080p or even higher still requires thousands on GPUs which I'm not willing to do. However simply having more than 1080p for desktop usage is accessible and has been so for over 10 years. A 4k monitor costs a fraction of what a gaming GPU costs. My desktop iGPU from 2014 has zero problems driving 2x4k. It also does so with the system consuming less than 60W from the wall at usage (lower than some laptop CPUs do these days).
If you want to play the useless popularity game, go and check what are the resolutions on the phones and tablets with even smaller screens sold in the last 10 years (which exceeds the number of laptops by far), and even friggin' eink notepads.
"The fact" is people today would never accept sub-retina dpis even for cheap phones, and the market has clearly spoken. "The fact" is your arguments about human perception are utter bullshit (as trivially disproven as todays arguments about 60fps), and remind me of the discussions I had when forced to use 60fps 800x600 TN screens (pure hell on earth) after having used 1280 at 90hz for ages with CRTs, all in the name of "progress".
> so neither shows up on steam survey as anything other than 1080p
The hardware survey doesn't occur while games are running. It's recording the display setting of your desktop, which would put you and everyone like you in the 4K bucket.
> If you want to play the useless popularity game, go and check what are the resolutions on the phones and tablets with even smaller screens sold in the last 10 years
I have a rather new high-end phone. Its native resolution is 2400x1080, and that 2400 is only there because phones have a particularly long aspect ratio compared to other devices.
> "The fact" is people today would never accept sub-retina dpis even for cheap phones, and the market has clearly spoken.
1920x1080 is a wildly popular resolution. You appear to be frustrated that the market hasn't spoken in your favor.
> "The fact" is your arguments about human perception are utter bullshit
You appear to be hallucinating arguments that I haven't made.
