Greetings Maestros.
The most believable, photo-realistic experience I have had on an average "14 or "15 CRT, playing Rome Total War on 1280x1024, at a terribly low refresh rate.
So, Wider or Nicer?
It is mutually exclusive, if I am right, as Pixel Pitch increases with size (or rather stays almost constant in boundaries), thus ruining/maintaining quality.
It can be both. Albeit, most consumer displays keep a similar pixel pitch, with the advent of apple's retna display and upgrading their os to support higher dpi settings and windows 8 supporting it natively, we should start to see pixel pitch increase. UI element should be able to be rendered larger (or smaller if you want more desktop space).
Then why celebrate 1080p, when Pixel Pitch is mostly constant between 0,250-0,300mm at all resolutions with standard sizes? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot_pitch)
I'd love to own and use monitors with large pixel pitches. If it could get to the point where I couldn't see the pixels, that would be awesome.
Also would you suggest purchasing a 1080p monitor with ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB - for playing some few-years old games?
I wouldn't buy a 1080p monitor to play older games in which a lot of the times, the max resolution supported is 1600x1200 and a 1080p monitor cant reproduce that. I'd buy a 1920x1200 (or higher) resolution monitor personally.