resolution vs. effects

in terms of looking good, which matters more; setting the effects to high, or a 1920x1200 screen res? and if each of them has their own pros and cons, can you please explain them?

 

Most of the games will look much better at high resolution than at lower ones, regardless the settings, eg : a game at 1900x1200 with low/medium details will most definitely have better graphics than it at 1024x768 with high settings.

If your computer can handle a game at higher resolution, don't bother going lower ones with higher settings.

And another upside of going with higher resolution is that you don't really need high AA or sometimes even no AA to make the game look nice, where at lower resolution the game will look like utterly crap without AA. Resolution and AA are usually the biggest two performance killers, i am talking from my own experience.

 

Try sticking to native, I always do that, although, I have never had to turn down my resolution.

 

I always prefer native resolution, rather than lower it for higher effects.

At native res I hardly see any difference with AA on, and AA is a performance killer...

 

i also agree with everyone else, i try to keep it at native resolution, and sometimes Ive actually found that lowering the res hasn't improved the graphics or fps.

 

I agree with all of you! There's not really a point of lowering the resolution.
Just keep it simple and leave things how they are.

 

yep, native res at most, I never like to go below 1280x800 ( my native ) and if I must, I always feel that game is ugly even on ultra when playing on 1024x768

 

I won't play any games at less than native resolution.

I avoid lowering resolutions at all cost and will lower settings first.

Gaming looks crisp, non fuzzy and gorgeous at native resolution and using a lower one is like catch and release fishing. This is another reason why having a high end GPU with enough VRAM is essential. The higher res you go, the more that is important as well as CPU clock rates.

 

I prefer higher res to higher settings as well, though it's not hard and fast that higher res will overcome lower settings. For things like AA/AF it pretty much holds true, but if you are tweaking draw distances or water or lighting effects, or even texture quality, it's much more case by case as to whether higher res looks better than higher settings. Personally, I start with max res, max all other settings, then drop AA first till I get perf I can deal with. Lighting effects tend to be another intensive thing, and also something with least gameplay impact (either that or texture quality), so those are next to go.

 

Gotta be higher res, it has the biggest effect on visual quality by some way.

 

I would say that at least to some degree, draw distance has more efffect on playability than graphical fidelity though.

 

Mostly for FPS shooters.

 

I was playing COD4 at 800x600 low on all settings and I was fine (on a 1600x900 monitor). fps matters more to me than looks

 

Actually, I think it matters just as much if not more for RPGs, especially those like FO3, where you have large open areas, and if you can see the enemy from a long distance, you can avoid or engage the enemy on your terms before you get within it's aggro range. If you sacrafice draw distance in favor of graphics, you lose a tactical advantage.

Same goes for situational awareness in strategy games, I think.

 

True, and what a sacrifice it can be. You do also see it in FPS, just less.

 

Can anyone let me know how world of warcraft looks on a Sager NP8662 1680x1050 Max settings. Would i need to up AA or any of that crap or does it look good without?

 

It will run on max everything no problem.

 

Hey thanks iv been asking around a lot i know ppl are probably getting annoyed lol. Would there be any need for me to raise the Af and AA settings to max? or would the game look good enough with its settings on max? Also when you say it will run everything on max do u also mean the AA and Af on max including the games settings? What kind of fps would i be looking at?

 

I usually play at 1024 X768 and max AA. Like it when i play..

 

what kinda fps u get? do u play with shadows maxed?

 

It will play whatever settings you want very fast. It is a very powerful computer.

 

Remember that when you turn on AA, all you are doing is making your GPU render part or all of the scene at a higher resolution, then downscale it to the display resolution. So if you are running at 800X600 let's say with 2XAA, some or all of the scene (broken out by color channel or occlusion map or something else) is being rendered at 1600X1200. But if you have a 1600X1200 screen, and you run at 1600X1200 with no AA, you are getting a better picture. Quantitatively and qualitatively.

 

Great! Thank you everyone for putting up with all my annoying questions.


Wow Sirmetman i didn't know that thank you very much! So since i running it with a 1600X1200 screen and 1600X1200 res in game i dont need to turn AA on? What about AF and the feature that always you to do better quality or better performance?

 

AF is much more "bang for your buck" than AA is IMHO. It will give you noticeably better textures for very little processing overhead, it will keep them from "shimmering" and such. AA will only give you a moderately better image for a lot of overhead. I personally have a very hard time noticing a difference between 4xAA and anything higher.

Also IMHO, if you're running at native res, AA actually has more of an effect because it doesn't get the "free" antialiasing from the screen scaling effects of non-native resolutions on LCDs. The sharp graphics on native res displays make the edge shimmering much more apparent.

 

I agree on AF. Not sure about running non native though. I think higher res smooths edges by virtue of higher res alone to equal the "free" aa you would get with scaling.

 

It's all perception Things are sharper at native res, but jaggies are more readily apparent because of that. The color interpolation of AA gets you smoother edges simply because of the way our eyes work. An easy example I came across, if you have access to Civ4 (fairly old game, should run decently on most systems), load it up and look at the spinning globe at the main menu screen, and play with the different AA levels in the Options. Even at native screen res, the globe edges look much better with 2x or 4x AA than without any AA. I do agree that I'd rather have native res than not, but AA is most definitely a worthwhile quality improvement if you can do it. I'd even turn off some effects to get it.

 

Alright so i'll put the AA on x4 and dont worry about Af sense the native res does the job? Also wow has the Multisampling in it has an option in its video setting. What should i do with that? Put it max? and should i keep the option on multisampling or supersampling?


thanks again guys.

 

I get what you are saying. I just think, especially with the higher res panels we have these days (I'm thinking WSXGA+ ona 15" or WUXGA on a 17"), the size of pixels is so small that stairstepping/jaggies/aliasing/whatever term you like becomes all but invisible, so higher res without AA actually looks sharper/better than lower res with AA or scaled.

 

edit: I just realized multisampling was AA sry for all the confusion. It all makes sense now. And texture filtering in wow is AF.

 

settings > resolution IMO

a lower resolution may make you lose some of the sharpness of the picture but you will get used to the lower resolution quickly and not notice.

However the lack of effects can not go un noticed: ugly textures, missing shadows/reflections, lame explosions and particle effects, the list goes on and on and depends on the game.

Most video cards scale up a low resolution so well these days that its not a big deal at all.

For AA vs AF. AA is more intensive to run and will just smooth out those jaggies, AF is a texture thing and easier to run.

Id rather have jaggies than a really ugly imaginary line across the screen where textures magically change from low res to high res, and that is what happens with AF off.

So turn it on, even a low setting as long as its not off completly, but a higher setting doesnt take much more to run.

AA is not just a yes/no thing, its very game dependent. These newer games like say Crysis AA is nearly pointless and it has nothing to do with the resolution your running at, its all about how detailed the poly's are and the other game parts. In an older game though AA is very important to clean up the game and also easier to render.

AA is not something you need to crank up ether, just 2x AA will clean up the majority of the edges, from there its diminishing returns but it gets a lot harder on the system to crank it up.

So its quite clear to me that I would prefer a higher setting for effects in the game and a lower resolution if I had to make that choice for playable frame rates.

 

Obviously I try and keep to native res, but I think a game on minimum settings at native looks a lot worse than one at medium/high but with less resolution

 

Hey ty for th reply not to long ago i realized AA and AF are in wow just unedr different names that are part of the video settings. I'm planing on putting multisample to x4. and max all other settings. i'll see how it goes.

 

native res. dont care about settings as much

 

The highest resolution possible on your screen without zooming, which is generally your native resolution, is the best. Even if you put it to something lower, the fact that it isn't the native resolution makes it blurry and it generally looks really bad. For example, 1920 x 1200 will look better than 1280 x 800 with the settings up. If only my desktop had a GPU good enough to play Crysis at 1920 x 1200, I would, and I'd happily turn off all extra effects. But my 256MB 8600 GTS isn't good enough, and I literally can't change it to 1920 x 1200. It's not available in the settings. My laptop can play at 1920 x 1200 though...

 

Same here!!

 

High Res> Effects> High Res

 

Like mentioned in some posts above, I would trade-off some resolution for at least 2xAA and some high quality effects. In the case of AF almost any card can handle 4x easily, which is at least good enough for most purposes.

 

What is the point of AA at non native resolution? It's blurring anyway, completely swamping any effect of AA.

 

Totally depends on the game and the resolution your talking about.

Doing 720p on a 1080p monitor since its the same aspect its not very blurry at all, and trust me if you go play some old school games they are pretty jaggy, most new high tier games dont even need AA, its more of a little bonus rather than a requirement.

Seems to me the blurry effect is over exaggerated by most, or your equipment is not setup or capable of doing it right. the pixels on your screen are so small, if you take my 1080p monitor on my laptop I am typing on now I cant see a single pixel without getting nose to screen.

Scaling artifacts are very obvious when working with low resoutions, scale down a 100x100 avatar image to 50x50 and then size it back up and look how corrupted it got by having its pixel count reduced, but take a 1920x1080 image and scale it down to 1280x720 and then back up again and to the normal eye it will probably look the same.

The key here is that we have gone far enough in technology to have a lot of pixels to work with now so the distortion is very minimal, also make sure you use your software scaling not hardware and keep it in aspect.

If I crop my screen for 720p I would lose about 2" on the sides for 1:1, but if I let that scale in aspect my monitor is quite capable of showing me that same image nearly perfectly with the added pixels available, sure its not 1:1 anymore but your in motion and the video card makes smart choices in what to display where.

 

Am I right in saying that the higher the screen res the less blurry it will be if you use non native. E.g 1280x720 will be more blurry on a 1680x1050 screen than a 1920x1080 screen?

 

Not necessarily, though its possible. Just depends on how it all scales out, like I said most important thing is to keep the aspect.

1920x1080 and 1280x720 are the same but 1680x1050 is a 16:10 resolution so it would get distorted or have black bars.

The higher your resolution is the less blury it will be that I can state should always be true. I mean your set resolution not the panels native. So if you had a 1920x1200 panel 1680x1050 would look better than 1280x720 (not factoring in the aspect change)

 

native resolution looks gorgeous sharp, obviously. other than that, lower res results in less detail, which results in giving a better immersion as the brain is more free to interpret.

so, yes, i played crysis on 640x480, and it looked awesome at full max details with everything. it looked much better than in lower settings on 1280x800 or 1920x1200, and the smoothness was awesome.

but i as well had the screen set to not scale, so that the pixels are still sharp (and got then full antialiasing at max everything).

 

Yes. 10 char

 

That's not strictly true. If you have the game run at 1/2 or 1/4 or 1/8 etc res, it should still be quite sharp as in theory it will display at a 4:1 pixel ratio on the monitor. In otherwords, if your monitor is 1920X1200, it should look as sharp if the game is rendered at 960X600, but obviously not as detailed.