WUXGA 1920x1200 and games?!

Hi everyone. I ordered an xps m1530 a couple weeks ago with a WUXGA screen. I didn't even think about it at the time, but I'm now worried that my games might look like crap since there's no way i will be playing them at the screen's native resolution.

Have any of you tried some games on your FULL HD screens? And how is the quality when you crank down the resolution for the game? This has me a little worried now.

 

I wouldn't fret about it. Games aren't affected by switching to lower resolution, say 1680x1050, but through switching to non-native, everything else is. The pixel high def detail seems to be definitely worth it, i've seen a 17'' inch screen and I love the high def. I too am waiting for my xps m1530, yet would enjoy additonal feedback of those who play games on the xps WUXGA screen.

 

LED for 720p HD and gaming in native resolution :-D

 

1,296,000 pixels LED vs 2,280,000 pixels WUXGA, I prefer the pixels, but LED is brighter, both are in a way equal.

 

The 8600 card won't be able to handle most modern games even in 720p so there's going to be a change in resolution anyway, but with the WUXGA screen, more pixels mean better (fill-in) detail.


I've played NFS Most Wanted and Pro street and the cars look very shiny, you can turn the resolution down and everything else up and there's little degrading of quality.

 

Most 3D FPS games look fine on my XPS M1730 @ 1920x1200 display, even when using non-native resolutions. However, I doubt that the 8600GT will be able to handle 1920x1200. 8800M-GTX SLI is barely enough on UT3...

 

From my understanding the eye cant really tell the difference of 720p and 1080p, except for minor things require hawkeyes to see. And after 1 foot away the eye sees no difference.

This is from CNET HD Guide. Thats what made me go with he LED. Something the eye can see, color :-D

 

Either your laptop has horrific problems or there's no truth in what you're saying.
With a single 8800M GTX, I manage an average of atleast 50-60 FPS in UT3 at 1920x1200 maxed out graphics settings, but no AA.

 

Gaming on the 1920x1200 panel is great, older games will run at native resolution, newer games still look good at non-native.

Higher resolution displays handle non-native resolutions better, as more pixel density = better scaling.

Enjoy.

 

I get 30-55fps standard at 1920x1200, 4x AA enabled, though some UT3-maps drop my frame rate to as low as 10fps. When I crank up the post-processing effects, my frame gets slightly worse.

I'll try disabling AA and seeing what happens. BTW, I'm playing primarily large Warfare maps like Torlan, Downtown, and Floodgate.

EDIT: Just finished the above tests. No-AA looks horrible, even on my 24" external monitor, but going from "Quality" mode to "Performance" mode does make a difference. Even so, the Warfare Avalanche map was only giving me ~35fps average with SLI enabled. The server I was testing on was pretty laggy. I think I'll set the graphics mode to balanced -- any AA looks better than none.

 

Dropping the res from 1920x1200 to 960x600 is a good way of keeping FPS high. You may have to go through the painful process of creating 960x600 as a custom mode (please, don't ask me!) but as it's exactly half that of 1920x1200, it still looks good.

 

@ lord_shar, wow! That's crazy.... try dropping the AA. I play on no AA, since it's already so high resolution But I'll try that and confirm if I get the same FPS. But I'm confident if you lowered AA, you'd get better rates (with dual 8800M GTX, ofcourse!)

 

I've played Battlefield 2, NHL 08, and Madden 08 on the highest graphics settings all three have with absolutely no problems...and all three look beautiful. NHL '08 and Madden '08's level of crowd detail is simply amazing.

Battlefield 2 just blows me away on my laptop, also. I mean, it's SOOOOOO smooth, clear, and crisp...

 

When I tried no-AA, the "jagged stairs" effect was pretty visible on all diagonal image lines, even at 1920x1200 on my 24" display, but even 2x AA minimized it pretty well. At no-AA, I got about +5FPS boost. With Quality driver settings enabled and max UT3 settings, average frame rate was ~42fps in Warfare Torlan.

Are you running any specific video drivers? I'm just using Dell's latest...

 

Erm... yes, I'm using 175.75 from LV2G and so far it's great! Better than stock Sager drivers in almost every way...

 

An 8600M GT will literally choke at 1920x1200 due to its 128 bit bus.
But movies, screen real estate and sharpness are nothing to be reckoned with at that resolution, you just can`t beat that.

 

I'll have to give those a try... perhaps that's the missing link here. Thanks for the info!

 

Fantastic response, thanks for keeping it on the topic. Exactly what I was wanting to know.

 

I've never seen an LED backlit screen so I can't comment on that...

I have a 17" 1920x1200...and scaling up lower resolutions doesn't look that bad to me...

Lots of the older games have to be scaled because they don't offer resolutions greater than 1280x1024 (I mean older as in 10 years ago)...these games look as good to me as playing them on my desktop (CRT...so the desktop scales everything perfectly)...

I can't run some newer games at native resolution (World in Conflict, Rainbow 6: Vegas, Gears of War, Call of Duty 4) with acceptable frame rates (acceptable for me is around 30 fps w/out dropping below 20 fps)...I typically run these at one of the widescreen 1280 resolutions...I can't even tell a difference with Gears of War...Call of Duty 4 looks a little off so I turned off dynamic lighting and went back to 1920x1200...but for the most part, scaling doesn't look that bad to me, but then I may not be as particular as others...unless you're sitting two laptops side-by-side, I doubt you'll be unhappy playing games at 1280x800 on a 1920x1200 screen...you'll think it looks great and so will your friends...

And the additional real estate provided by a 1920x1200 screen is unbeatable when editing photos or video or opening multiple windows...I had a 15" UXGA screen prior to my current 17" WUXGA screen and its much inferior nVidia chip did scaling fine, too...and if you don't mind large black borders and reduced screen size, you can always use the nVidia control panel to turn off scaling...and just use 1280 of the 1920 horizontal pixels...

Interesting...I haven't spent much time with UT3, but my XPS 1710 with a 7950 GTX can keep 30-40 fps with all the eye candy on at 1920x1200 (AA is off but I don't notice much improvement with it on)...and my 1710, compared to other 1710 benchmarks I've seen, is a bit on the slow side...I think your 1730 may have driver/cooling/hardware issues...I'm using Dell's nVidia driver for my 7950...I think it's 174.31 from 03/31/08, but I'm not sure...so I wouldn't think it's a driver issue...the Dell stock drivers have done much better on UT3 benchmarks then what you're seeing...anandtech got 90 fps with the stock Dell driver on UT3 at 1920x1200 with no AA ( http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=3242&p=9)...again, it doesn't say what maps, but you're seeing a huge performance hit for 8800 SLI...get it fixed...

 

It could be a driver issue, but it's a bit difficult to tell given that I'm running NVidia control panel high-quality image settings (8x anisotropic, 4x AA, etc). I'll troubleshoot this later once done at work, but I am also seeing sporadic 1-sec video freezing that's been reported on Epic's UT forums: http://utforums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=585666 -- I will be cleaning and reinstalling my M1730's video drivers shortly.

 

Sporadic video freezing is a SLI issue, same with Gears of War which also uses the UT3 engine. The freezes is caused by micro stuttering, look it up in google.

 

Drivers were updated to 174.74 WHQL from laptopvideo2go... wow what a difference. No more stutters, and frame rate did improve about 20%... I'm seeing 35 - 60fps now with Quality driver settings + maxed UT3 settings on very large Warfare maps. Anyway, no more thread derails from me...

Regarding video scaling: I notice 3D games like UT3, Quake4, Guild Wars, Hellgate London, Star Trek Legacy, etc... all scale very well at lower resolutions on a 1920x1200 display. As mentioned by another, a high-def screen's higher pixel density allows it to fill pixel spaces more evenly. However, you need a beefy video system to handle such native resolutions... otherwise you will have to drop the resolution to get playable frame rates.

 

@ lord_shar, try 175.75 ... they'll improvise performance even much more!

 

ok, 1 more OT-reply... the 175.16 drivers are definitely better than 174.74. There was a persistent rundll32 error that kept popping up each reboot with 174.74. None of the recommended fixes (msconfig, manual driver update, etc) could correct the issue. However, 175.16 had no such problem (at least, none yet).

Thanks again for the advice! +1 rep for U.