Are the drops in resolution ever really noticeable? I've read that resolutions above 1440p are quite forgiving.
well... that's a bit of a different debate entirely.
Yea, it's tough to notice because the drops in resolution are likely to coincide with a lot of things happening on the screen at once, at that point in time your mind is focusing on the battle ahead and not so much the crispness of everything, unless it's noticeably worse. If we're talking pure theoretical output though... then.
For me, we should be comparing the difference in pixel count between the average resolutions, that's probably the most proper way to do it to be honest. There's some pet peeves i get when I read about people discrediting the performance profile of the 1X:
a) The first is that all of us, developers included, agreed that the power is best spent on making the game look better and to focus less on the resolution
b) We also agreed that frame rate was more important than resolution as we're likely to definitely feel drops in frame rate vs noticing drops in resolution during a heavy action sequence
c) Ultimately developers should have full control over what their game should look like
We've all agreed on points (a) through (c) and all of a sudden to win a point in a fight against MS, axioms (a) through (c) no longer matter in the equation of things, they're out to target some item said during an interview they also tried to make 900p xbox games also 4K. That's nothing they promised, especially given axioms (a) to (c). And for the most part considering that 1X should be about 4x the performance of XBO, we're seeing that, and we're seeing it at higher fidelity, more AF and higher settings, as we should expect. The claims were largely made as a result of 1X running the exact same settings as XBO. No enhanced game we've seen on 1X, has only done a pure resolution boost. We just haven't.
It is marketed as a 4K machine, and amongst all the consoles it's clearly getting really close to being consistently there. And aside from a couple of titles in the lower end, X1X for the most part manages to hit that number fairly well.