Best performance with native resolution?

Hi!

When Im reading about gaming laptops, everyone always say the games run best at native resolution. Why is that? I'm thinking of buying a sony vaio FW21Z which has a native resolution of 1920 x 1080. But wouldnt I get better performance in games if I scale down to something lower? I want a good gaming experience, and I prefer detail over higher resolution. But when watching movies a higher resolution is ofcourse always appreciated.

Im sure I've gotten this wrong thats why I need some explaining.

Thanks!

 

Running a game at lower will give better performance on most cases, but the display looks best on native resolution. Non native resolution can cause the image to look blurry.

 

Yes, games at natural resolution look better but alot of people are forced to play at lower resolutions because their video card cannot perform as well on natice resolutions.

With movies you can basically run it on full screen @ native resolution with a integrated graphics card. So movies are never a problem.

 

LCD monitors(unlike CRT monitors) have a native resolution from which the pixels are most optimized for. Therefore, the image obtained at that resolution will be better than the images obtained at other resolutions. I think depending on which native resolution you have, scaling may be better for some resolutions than others.

Running games on lower resolutions will definitely increase performance, but at the cost of a less "optimal" image so it might look worse for some people, but I've heard others say they don't notice the difference so it's really up to you >.>

 

I'm assuming the VAIO FW series has a Mobility Radeon 3650, at best?

Such a GPU will have a hard time playing games at such a high native res. Just play at lower res and crank up other settings, it will look better than native res and absolutely minimal settings [and even then, the latter still doesn't guarantee playability]. So yeah, combining lower res and higher settings is what you want.

You can still watch HD movies with that 1080p display, too.

 

Thanks for the replays. Pretty much as I thought then .

 

My 2 cents.
I personally dont believe the opinions about blurriness at higher resolutions and heres why:
Obviously, when you play at a higher resolution you get more resolution and detail.
when you play at a lower resolution you lose resolution and that loss is "blurriness".

I had a friend over the other day and we were playing a LAN game, both laptops, both 15,4", his resolution 1920, mine 1280.
It was an old game so we both could max it, I asked him to reduce his resolution just to compare and I looked really hard and very from angle and distance and couldnt tell the difference...

 

You are in the minority. Most people can definitely notice a difference. I have minor near-sightedness. Running native vs. non native resolution is almost like the difference from when I wear my glasses to when I don't. I don't technically need them for regular wear or even driving, but things sure just look "crisper" when I do.

 

I have seen other discussions about the same thing. Basically what you will get is some people saying it doesnt matter, backed up by some technical explanation. Others will swear they notice a difference.

My personal experiences have been even more complicated. I usually try to play at my screens native resolution. When I opt for a lower resolution I don't experience any blurriness in almost any game (anything noticeable anyway). But there have been a couple of games where I truly believe I DID see some blurriness at non-native resolutions. Now of course lower resolution , is well... lower resolution. But that is not the thing I'm talking about. I'm talking about an overall kind of fuzziness that affects the entire screen and is nothing like the effects of lowering a resolution. An example of a game where I experienced this is Lord of the rings online. And example of a game where I really dont see any blurriness is COD4.

I think I just added to the confusion but there you have it

 

It depends on how well everything scales. I mean, there must be a difference if people are noticing one, but IMO it mustn't be horrible either. I'd probably prefer playing at lower resolutions but higher details over a high native resolution and lowest details though.

 

When you guys says "native resolution" are you refering to the max resolution your screen can handle? OR do you mean any resolution with the same aspect ratio? OR do you mean any resolution that you can switch to in the gpu's control panel? I am guessing you mean the max resolution, since I have been doing alot of testing with Far Cry and notice a size difference

 

I suppose it may make a difference if you are changing aspect ratio and also on the games configuration but I dont think those differences are too much to judge by...
Depends what else you wanna do on your laptop though, I like photoshopping so more resolution is better for me

 

CPU Bottleneck?