Quick Resolution vs. Game Performance Question

Hi all,
I own a Asus G73JH laptop and I have recently acquired a 1080p monitor. I have been playing some Crysis 2 lately.
While playing on my laptop at 900p, I average around 40FPS, perfectly playable, and I'm running Advanced Settings (middle). When I hook up my 1080p monitor, performance slows to about 25 FPS average so I lower the settings to Gamer (one notch lower) I am just curious as to if playing on the higher res, at lower settings, would look better than say a slightly higher setting on a lower res?
I'm trying to figure out if I should just keep playing on my laptop screen vs the 1080p monitor..

Thanks!

 

Depends on the game, really. For FPS games, I feel that resolution (as long as it's not too abysmal) isn't too much of an issue, whereas some eye candy is nice. For RTS games, resolution is a lot more important. Also largely personal preference, so I'd just try both out and see which one you like more.

 

I'd simply play on whichever screen is of higher quality, and having seen reviews of that 900p screen, I'll bet that's by far the external monitor.

If anything, try setting the monitor to 900p.

 

Yeah, I also find it depends on the type of game. And I agree that RTS games are nice played at the display's native resolution where as with FPS games I don't mind lowering the resolution.

In general, if the game is 3D and more of the action doesn't happen in the distance, then I don't mind lowering the resolution. If the game is 2D or cell-shaded 3D then I like to play at the display's native resolution.

 

Thanks for the quick response,
But what happens when I lower the res of my 22" 1080p monitor, the image is not fit to screen and like, streched all weird idk how to describe it. So in an FPS you would take lower res and higher settings vs higher res and lower settings, but the opposite in an RTS such as Starcraft 2?

 

You need to keep the same 16:9 aspect ratio so it doesn't look stretched.

 

How do adjust my 1080p monitor to 16:9 after changing the screen res?

 

It's extremely perceptual. It really depends, neither is inherently better. You'll never come to a consensus on such a point- scientific testing would always place some people in both camps.

Fortunately, with PC games, by allowing you to change the settings, you can experiment and make your own determination without much blood and sweat. It's pretty easy to try both and pick.

 

It's not a problem with your monitor, you just have to run the game at 16:9 resolutions. Here are the 16:9 resolutions which are supported on most cards:

1920x1080
1600x900
1366x768
1280x720

 

another factor which I neglected to mention was that your preference of settings vs resolution could also be greatly impacted by some other factors:

1- the scaling algorithm used to stretch the image to the full screen

2- the size of the screen together with the distance between yourself and the screen