Gaming at non-native res?

Ok so ive been looking at wsxga+ vs a wsga (s/z96j) and as I read i heard mentioned that the higher res of the wsxga+ puts a larger load on the GPU. Thats a no brainer but as i read on i got confussed if turning the res down on the display of such a monitor would help in the performance. All my knowledge tells me that it would help but i got confussed after so much reading.

 

Yes you can turn down the resolution in the game which will not put such a load on the GPU. ALthough playing games outside the monitors native res tends to produce less than perfect results. But its still playable, but the image is not as sharp.

 

As long as you keep the aspect ratio, it shouldn't be bad at all. When you are playing the game, you won't care.

 

Im guessing you mean "not sharp" by the same thing that happens to you desktop where everything kinda smears and blurs?

 

Yep, it would indeed help.

The tradeoff is that you'll either have to accept less perfect display quality (scaling), or an actual display size less than the full physical display (AKA letterboxing/columnboxing -- no scaling). That is, in most cases, controlable in your driver control panel. You might want to make the tradeoff differently depending upon what game you're playing.

 

No - not exactly - well maybe.

On your desktop CRT, you can change the display from 800x600 or 1024x768 or 1280x960, etc. and the only real changes are the icons and text get bigger or smaller. (I think b/c the pixel size can change on a CRT or else the screen supports the max number of pixels).

On a flat-panel LCD or a notebook, they had a "native resolution" let's say it was 1024x768, so they looked good at that but would look fuzzy at 800x600 or 1280x960.

I have heard that they are much better at this than they used to be, and it would bother some people more than others. It also would be more annoying trying to read text with it than dealing with in-game graphics.

I would recommend you go to a Best Buy or Circuit City and try changing the desktop resolution (right-click on desktop>Properties>Appearance) and see how it looks and whether it would bother you.

 

Yeah as Tiger said on a laptop if you set the resolution to something other than native the desktop will look blurry. This is also true for games, but in all honesty games never seem to look as blurry as the desktop does when its set outside the native res.

As Chaz said, just make sure you keep the aspect ratio to prevent strething the image across the screen, and you really won't notice once you get into the game. Nearly every game i've played recently has been outside the native res CoD2 for example was at 1024x600, but it never took anything away from the game.