And why is it a waste? VGA interfaces are perfectly capable of 1080p.

Not wanting to jump the gun here - How far is the monitor away from your computer, and what monitor are you using?

You should only start to be concerned if your VGA cable is long enough to acting like an antenna susceptible to external interference (eg RFI).
Analogue cables by themselves do not add distortion to the signal, external interference more likely, unless the cable itself is not well built, where both issues can be simply resolved by buying a better cable.

Digital to analogue solutions for monitors are very mature technology today thus degradation from converting these signals shouldn't be much of a concern, minute, if any.


You do not have much of a choice here, unless you want to fork out for a HDMI switch of some sort. Which then you'd need to start worrying about additional stuff like whether the HDMI switch causes other issues i.e. distortion, another component which can fail, drivers/software issues, possible degradation of signal (yes even for digital, this is possible. Also error corrections are done using approximations) within the switch itself. Not sure if switches/splitters can support Extended monitor mode (instead of just duplicating) as well - You'll need to find out.


Well, you could always experiment since you have the added advantage of accessing both platforms. How much does VGA cables cost nowadays anyway, unless you're running long lengths of them. You can compare between HDMI and VGA yourself and see if you'd notice any difference. For my case, I run 3 monitors at home and 2 from my laptop, for movies, gaming, and programming work with more than 12 hours of viewing time every day, nada issues detected so far.


PS: Note that the snippet you've provided assumes the luxury of choosing one between two connections - VGA vs HDMI/Digital. Hence "all else being equal" applied, which I do not think applies to you, given that those are the only two connections you have.