Thoughts on 1440x900 resolution?

Hey guys,
For a not hardcore gamer as myself, would a 1440x900 resolution and a 512mb 8600gt card work well? I dabble in the latest games just for fun, not to run them at max settings. What I am most interested in is any thoughts you might have on how this resolution will work for gaming. Say, CS:source or company of heroes etc. Thanks a lot for the input.

 

Yeah, that's a very good resolution for that card. You'll probably be able to play CS: Source at it's highest settings, and Company of Heroes at medium-high settings.

 

1440x900 is not a low resolution. Especially on smaller screens. Even on 17" screens I consider it to be a mid-range resolution at worst. I had a machine that came with a 1440x900 that I broke. It got replaced with a 1680x1050 screen. I nearly cried. The video card in that machine was starting to show its age, and games that I used to be able to play on medium-high settings at my native resolution, I now had to lower my resolution, or my settings. I hated it.

My point is, in a laptop, with a video card that can't be upgraded (which is nearly all laptops, let's not fool ourselves here), even if you can play current games at high resolutions, very soon you are going to have to sacrifice something. Since you are not a hardcore gamer, I doubt you are going to want to upgrade to a brand new machine in another year. Do yourself a favor and get a low resolution screen and keep your FPS up. You will probably find that your time spent gaming will be much more enjoyable if your not fighting your hardware all the time, and who knows, maybe you'll become a hardcore gamer.

 

Thanks for the responses guys, they were very helpful.

 

Agree with Kenny completely. Although higher resolutions are not for games only I find trying to read spreadsheets and word documents very difficult at WSXGA+. Not to mention movies always scale down to 720p unless you have an HD-DVD or BluRay optical drive...mainstream GPUs and high resolutions don't mix at least from the gaming side.

 

why does a dell XPS laptop have a 1900 res then, it was because of this fact that I got a 1650 for my 17 inch laptop

 

Because a lot of people automatically assume a higher resolution is a better thing. Bigger numbers = better in marketing terms.

Don't get me wrong, high res screens are not the devil. For watching HD movies, working with documents on a large screen, etc, high res is great. But for getting the most FPS out of a game, the higher your resolution goes, the harder the GPU has to work to render the scene, the less FPS you get. Sure, you can lower the resolution to something more reasonable, but besides the fact that doing so lowers image quality considerably, why pay for high res if your not going to use it. Another thing to consider is screen size, if you pack an extremely high resolution into a small screen, you wind up squinting to read text.

 

Totally agree. For browsing, multi-tasking and HD movies a high resolution is great. But for games, I prefer a lower resolution. It allows you to play at native resolution (non-native resolutions give a weird blur) at high settings.

Your choise is great. You will be able to play all the games of today (Oblivion for example) at high settings at native resolution with good fps.

 

I actually love that resolution. My friend got a new widescreen monitor with that resolution and I think it was either 117 or 19 inches. It looks very nice and gaming on it was verrrry fun.

 

CS:S's highest Resolution is 1280X800. So you can do that (along with everyone else) with high graphics (like everyone else)

 

Say what? It depends on your monitor (and also the game but CS:S supports up to 2***x1***).

Mike.