resolution vs other settings

I always play my games at med - lower resolutions, but crank my settings higher so that the game looks nicer. For example, I'll play COD4 on 1024 x 768 but turn everything up, put on 2x AA and half AF and still get very solid FPS. I honestly can't see HUGE differences in resolution boosts, but maybe I haven't gone up enough? Regardless, I enjoy my games with the settings turned up, just looks nicer

You guys?

 

While I'm voting for going higher resolution and keeping settings low, it only applies if you're going native res, which makes it look much better. Also, 1280x768 is not a high resolution. 1440x900, 1680x1050 or 1920x1200 are high.

 

lol, to me that's high

 

1440x900 is a low-ish resolution, IMO. That's even lower than 1280x1024, pixel-count wise. 1680x1050 is the new medium resolution. And 1920x1200 is high, I say.

 

Scaling these days is great, you lose very little in when you run a lower resolution as long as its the same aspect ratio in my opinion. I have a big 37" monitor with 1920x1080 and dropping it down to 12x7 and then up to full native the only chance is that it looks more sharp/crisp with the full resolution.

But if your balancing performance and have to turn down the settings or the resolution to get a good frame rate by a long shot I would drop the res first, what good is that little bit of a sharper image going to do you if you have al the textures and effects turned down? Plus on a small laptop screen the resolution change is even less noticeable than on my big monitor.

 

umm if my cpu cant handle a game too well, i just lower the res, until i can play it.

 

You need a good monitor for that though. If you are playing on a laptop screen you usually get pretty poor scaling, so cranking up the resolution will make a dramatic difference in the looks of the game.

If it's not your core clock speed bottlenecking your GPU, then turning up the resolution would probably be the best option on a laptop.