differences in resolutions while gaming?

helllo,

in the old days, I used to game on resolutions of 640*480 and 800*600.
however, in these days i see people game at 1024*768 and higher!
i am getting a laptop so i will join this crowd of gamers at high resolutions for the first time of my life.

I have a question though; what difference does it make to game in different resolutions in regard to quality and FPS?

thank you

 

Well it makes the picture better, and u get overall better quality. The FPS will also be affected by the resolution. The lower reslolution the better FPS in most cases.

 

Take a photo, open it in paint, scale it down and then back up again. The original is the high resolution one, the new picture is the low resolution one. Same theory applies to games. More pixels will make up each element, so things will look clearer and crisper opposed to blurry and rough. Though because more pixels will have to be processed, your GPU will be stressed more and you will drop in FPS. 1024x768 is pretty low IMO by today's standards. I play COD4 at 1680x1050. Almost any laptop you get you'll be playing at 1280x800.

 

Yeah 1024x768 is considered very low. 1280x800 is a minimum among laptop gamers, people with better systems run at 1680x1050 or 1920x1200.

 

I don't consider 1024x768 "very low". Not even close. 800x600 is very low, 1024x768 is medium, and since many laptops come with native 1280x800, anything from that resolution and up is high.

 

There is a lot to this question.. others sumaries are right -- in general, lower res means less work for the engine, so more frames per second.

But there is more to it .. at lower resolution, people tend to like anti-aliasing more, which costs the engine a lot of work. At higher resolution, many people don't mnind having less or nil anti-aliasing.

On some video cards, the end-scaling costs a lot of time.. ie: If your display is actually 1920x1200 (say), and you're running at 1024x768 and thus it scales up to your full screen.. some (crappy) video cards will run better at native, then at low and scaling up. (!!)

I have found I prefer to run at native res and lose a few FPS, or lose anti-aliasing, than scale down.. but I also don't mind running at 1600x1024 on my 1920x1200 display. I won't run it any lower, damnit

You will have to fiddle and see what you like, and how it performs on your machine, for which games. Too many variables

jeff

 

so running at high resolutions means, almost, no need to run AA?
in other words, will high resolutions create the same or similar type of effect, which AA will provide?
and by high resolutions i mean 1280*800
thanks

 

I wouldn't say it eliminates the need for AA, but it does mitigate it. You can get equal or better picture quality with higher res and lower AA settings compared to lower res and higher AA.

 

thanks sirmetman,
thats what i was looking for!

thanks to everybody else too!

 

You can get better picture quality with higher res than with AA, but the AA costs a lot less work with modern video cards.