Who games outside native resolution?

What I want to know is how bad does it look when you play games in a lower resolution? How many of you play games outside of the native resolution on your notebooks?

My specific issue is I am looking into getting a 1705. The screen options are WUXGA and WXGA. I play a lot of games and I know for a fact that I won't be able to run all my games at the native resolution on the WUXGA display now and in the future as games demmand better hardware I will have to lower it even more to get decent performance. On the WXGA I may not have to run outside the native resolution so that is a big plus. I hear reports of the WXGA monitors from dell having massive light leak problems (they all do, but the WXGA is more likely to be worse).

So my questions are.

Do any of you guys and gals play games outside the native resolution? How does it look?

Those of you with a dell 1705 with WXGA+ screen are you happy with it, or are the viewing angles very limited?

If you prefer one screen over the other have you actually compared both back to back, are you just guessing that whatever you paid for looks better than what you did not pay for?

 

Games won't be affected by running at lower resolution.

 

Gaming at lower resolutions will be fine as ZaZ says.

Just make sure to enable "fixed aspect ratio scaling" in your GPU settings.

 

Hmm, I don't think that is accurate.

"a LCD monitor has to rely on interpolation (scaling of the image), which causes a loss of image quality"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_resolution

Hopefully it is not too bad though?

 

If you use fixed aspect ratio scaling, the drivers will scale whatever program is running outside the native resolution to make it look clear. The disadvantage is that you will see black bars on the sides of the monitor. That, and it only works on digital displays. So if you're playing via the laptop's screen or have an external display hooked up via DVI, it will be fine. This option is not available, at least on NVIDIA cards, if you're using analog.

 

Last I heard, it wasn't available at all on ati cards. I haven't looked for it on mine though, since my ati card is attached to a 4:3 monitor.

I've played Oblivion on this laptop a bit. At no point running at 1280x800 did I exclaim "The blurrs are burning my eyes!" -- I never saw anything that reminded me I was at a nonnative resolution.

 

I play certain games in lower resolutions than my native 1680x1050 WSXGA+ screen because either A) my graphics card is not powerful enough to handle games at that resolution, or B), the game does not support widescreen.

I have it set to stretch the resolution; yes, it is a bit blurry but I don't mind. When you are playing the game, you don't notice that much and I do not think it detracts from the gameplay. If possible I keep the 16:10 aspect ratio (ex: 1680x1050 down to 1280x800), and then it looks pretty good.

 

I have a 1450x1050 native resolution LCD on my work laptop (X300 graphics), and I end up running my games at 1024x768 and stretching them to fill the screen. Not much of a problem. You do notice a bit of the blurring if you look closely, but it's not bad at all, and much better than running the game slowly. And I like the higher res for actual work, so it's not a tradeoff I'm worried about.

 

Like Chaz already said:

1- My videocard can't handle the resolution 1280*800. I actually did not have this problem so far. I prefer native resolution with low details then non-native resolution with medium details.
2- The game does not support widescreen. I played Splintercell 2 and 3 at 1024*768. Playing at widescreen was difficult with these games, you had to install several things to play at widescreen. So I played it at 1024*768. Looks good, when you are in the game you dont pay attention to those bars.

Charlie

 

There is an option on ATI cards to scale it and put black bars on the screen.

But I play outside native resolution with a lot of games that I cant run at full rez. I can go all the way down to 1200x800 and the blurring is minimal. My screens full rez is 1680x1050 btw.

 

Well, I have played a few games at non-native, mostly the FEAR Extraction Point demo since it doesn't support anything above 1024x768 and there is currently no widescreen hack that I have found. The biggest problem is the bluriness if you let it scale to widescreen. But playing at non-native resolution tends to make "jaggies" more evident. You can resolve this by turning on Antialiasing. But that takes a lot of GPU horsepower. And the thing is that at lower resolution screens such as a WXGA+, it'll seem even worse since your max resolution is so low to begin with. For instance, from what I have heard, 1280x800 on a 1440x900 screen will look worse than 1680x1050 on a 1900x1200. But I have no experience with that.

I have the WXGA+ on the M90 (pretty much same as E1705), and it doesn't bother me at all. I kind of like the lower resolution. Now, when I go back to my old 14" 1400x1050, it seems kind of hard to see. Of course, on the E1705, you have to realize that the WXGA+ will be matte and the WUXGA will be glossy. For me, gaming wouldn't be as big of a difference as just general use and glossy vs. matte would be.

 

Guys you're all forgetting a very viable option. Even if you choose a lower resolution than your native, you don't HAVE to scale it up to take up the screen. You can have it still in native "resolution" it's just that it'll be in a small box on the screen. (as if you would've had a smaller area of screen w/ the same dots/inch, but still lower resolution in terms of pixels per length and width)

 

I did go to a dell kiosk today and look at Notebooks.

I looked at a 17 inch 1705 with a the glossy WUXGA+ high res screen and a 1505 (?) 15 inch with a matte screen.

I liked the high res glossy screen better. I DO THINK Dell just has crappy matte screems or at least that one was. The matte screen was acceptable but the viewing angles were not as good and I imagine them to be worse on a larger screen. I KNOW other manufactures make good matte screens but at least some or all of Dells notebook matte screens are not super great.

I played around on the 1705 with its 1920x1200 screen and putting it a to a lower res in windows made things a bit blurry, but it was usable. I am sure I can just tweek the fonts to be larger and be more to liking and run windows at the antive LCD res and be ok. They had the battlefield 2 demo on there and the three res choices were 800x600, 1024x768, and 1600x1200. None of them were wide screen resolution. They had it set up to stretch the game to fit the wide screen no matter what and it actually looked fine at 1600x1200. I would not call it blurry. Even the in game text was good enough. 1024 looked okay too stretched but not nearly as good.

I had the guy let me into the card setting and changed it so it would not stretch the image and just display any game at its resolution with black bars around it. In other words when BF2 ran at 1600x1200, it took up 1600x1200 pixels on the 1920x1200 monitor and the unused pixels on the side were black and the image was 4:3. This looked perfect. I did not try 1024 but im sure it looked good but the image would have been small.

One note is that BF2 with all setting on high, no AA, 1600x1200 did chug when I panned the camera around, I would assume because 256 megs just was not enough for all that data. Lowering texture res to medium fixed it. I am sure reducing the amount of video memory used any other way would have also fixed it (render lower resolution, medium terrain and geometry, whatever) Or it is possible that the newer BF2 patches reduce some memory overhead.

The spec on the machine was a 2 ghz core duo (not core duo2) , don't know how much ram, and a gf go 7900 GS, WUXGA+ glossy display, don't know the HD speed.

 

256MB of video memory is plenty, the system probably only had 1GB of RAM so that explains the stuttering issues. Thanks for the info.