Screen Resolution + Performance?

Hello,

To what degree does screen resolution affect the overall performance of a machine? (namely during gameplay)

I ordered a computer recently with a WSXGA display, and I am thinking of changing to a WXGA display to enhance performance. Am I worrying too much, or would a change of displays make a difference?

 

The actual screen resolution has absolutely no effect on gaming performance.
However, what does have a huge effect is the resolution at which you set the game to run. Many people like to set the game to run at "native" resolution (i.e. your LCD's max resolution), so that there isn't any blurriness caused by scaling the picture to fit your LCD. If that's the case for you, then yes, you will take a performance hit by gaming at WSXGA+ resolution.

 

yes i agree.....you could lower your resolution a little for better framerates......

 

i agree with odin on this one. u can lower the resolution on a high res screen but it will look some what, blurry. the textures and overall picture will look much better if u keep the in game resolution the same as the native resolution of ur screen.

 

I'm sorry, but I can't fully agree.

I've never really gamed on a laptop, but I use an LCD screen for my desktop, and all LCDs have this same problem, correct? The native resolution for this screen is 1280x1024, and I usually game at lower resolutions (computer isn't all that powerful anymore), and I've never noticed blurriness, or not enough of it to be a problem.

If you want a larger resolution for your desktop you can always drop your res while you game. It's not that big of a deal.

 

Personally, I don't think it's a big deal either. But I had to mention it because a huge number of gamer's swear that games look like **** if you don't use native resolution.

 

unless 90% percent of the gamers are on drugs?

 

it also depends on how far down u bring down ur resolution. lets say ur screen resolution is 1440 x 900. u bring down ur screen resolution to 1280 x 800. ur not gonna see THAT big of a difference. but lets say u bring it down to 1024 x 768. ur gonna see a much larger difference.

 

agreed. plus it depends on the resolution of your screen. 1920x1200 screen running 1280x800 will look sharper than a 1440x900 screen running 1280x800.

there are a lot of factors.

even two different screens that are both 1440x900 running 1280x800 might have a different look based on the differences in the screens in the first place. not all LCD screens are equally sharp, equally bright, equally clear. and different texture qualities in games will tend to either mask or pronounce the effect.

 

Actually, the opposite is true. The larger the gap between rendered pixels and displayed pixels, the blurrier the image gets. Scaling is the enemy of image quality (sharpness specifically). Of course this doesn't apply to CRTs, but the last time a notebook had a CRT was in the 80's, last time I checked.

This is true. Also, since image quality is subjective and eyesight varies so much, obvious blurring to one person may not be apparent to another on an identical setup.

 

Thats not true at all. Do a thought experiment to solve this problem.

Imagine a screen with 800x600 pixels. It displays 800x600 pixels perfectly. Now think about a 1024x768 native resolution screen displaying 800x600 image. Its blurry because there are a varying sizes of pixel clusters that must each act as one. Now imagine a 1600x1200 screen displaying an 800x600 image. It can do it perfectly by allotting 4 pixels (since each pixel is a square, the 4 pixel cluster is the correct shape) to act as 1, it displays a perfect image.

Somewhere inbetween the two perfect resolutions (800x600 and 1600x1200) there is the "worst" interpolation. Its not the halfway mark between the two resolutions. It might be more like 1024x768 or so. Its probably a nonstandard resolution. Then from that resolution (lets call it 1024x768, which is probably close), as you approach 1600x1200, the blurriness goes down, until it hits 1600x1200 and is perfect again.

You could draw a graph of "blurriness" that would look sort of like a sin curve that would hit 0 at 800x600, 1600x1200, 3200x2400, and would hit a local maximum at some value in between each resolution listed. Obviously resolutions really close to 800x600 or 1600x1200 will look better than say 1200x900. And as the resolution keeps increasing, the maximum blurriness level (between each perfect interpolation) goes down overall. Think about a screen with infinite resolution. It could interpolate any image perfectly. As resolution increases to infinity, blurriness tends to go down (approaches 0).

i hope i disproved you sufficiently. go Gedankenexperiment!

 

Is native res ANY number you choose for the desktop?

 

your monitor has a physical number of pixels. you should know that when you buy it. most wide screen monitors today have a resolution of 1280x800, 1440x900, 1680x1050, or 1920x1200. that is your native resolution.

 

Read the full content of this Article: http://www.dev.notebookreview.com/news/portable-thumb-drive-pcs-headed-to-market-starting-in-july/

 

The main reason I try to play games on native resolution...

is so its easier to alt+tab

 

i definitely do it so the game doesnt look like butt. but i guess the alt+tab is another good one.

 

Since my current laptop is poo, I game using a really low resolution, One good side to the inherent fuzziness is that it cancels out the jaggies that happen when you run in a lower resolution.

I swear I can crank the detail up way higher without penalty too...

I have a question for the knowledgable people on this thread: It's my understanding that Pixel Shaders operate on a 'per pixel' basis. By running at a much lower resolution (Lets say a 480P widescreen resolution as opposed to a 1080p widescreen) are we making the Graphics card do less work (pixel shader wise)?

The reason I ask is because on the game "Saints Row" on Xbox 360, a patch was released which activates 4 X AA, but only when you run the game in 480P. I'm assuming this is because the reduced resolution frees up GPU overhead? Am I right? Or horribly, horribly mistaken?

 

In per pixel,
414720(480p) vs 2073600 (1080p)
Obviously 480p is significantly less pixels,
I think that makes your pixel shaders work just that much less, but im not entirely shure, I don't really know much about it...


masterchef341 , do you know? You seem to know about this sort of stuff.

 

Yes, playing a game at a lower resolution (with fewer pixels) will absolutely free up additional GPU power, in a pretty much one to one ratio with the number of pixels fewer that you're rendering. I.E. if you have to render 10,000 pixels, that will take half as much power as if you have to render 20,000 pixels.

 

Great! Because I have no problems with playing in lower resolutions!

Even 800x600 is acceptable for me! So my new Geforece 8400 GS should be sweet.

 

Yes, at low resolutions (1024x768 and below) the 8400GS should actually be a pretty powerful card.

 

Running games at non-native resolutions without filtering is like being near-sighted, everything blurs in the distance.

There's a big difference the sharpness of native resolutions vs. non-native. If you play a game that doesn't let you notice fine details (racing, fighting, etc), a blurry view is alright, but FPS games tend to have crisp everything.