will playing a game not on my native res look worse?

hi. if i have a 1920 17" and i play a game at 1440, will it look worse than a native 1440 17" playing a game at 1440.

thank you in advance!

 

Nope, in games non-native LCD resolutions are almos unnoticeable. At least as far as I can tell.

You only notice it environments where there are clear lines and text like Windows.

 

ditto, i play games at 640x and 800x on an 1024x LCD, and i cant notice any difference...and i looked for it

 

Theoretically, there will be a slight difference. You're trying to fit 1440 pixel into a grid of 1920 pixels. That means around 500 of them have to be stretched or interpolated. Whether or not you'll notice that though? Dunno, it's probably not too bad.

 

that is good to know.

 

For me it's noticeable, especially when your reading text, because the font is not as crisp and clean as when you're running native res. But that's acceptable for me. The difference isn't night and day.

 

Agreed, but the question was about gaming, not reading text. In games it doesn't usually make such a big difference.

 

I only notice a difference when dropping way down from my native resolutions. Things look a bit stretched.

 

I refuse to run a game not in native res. If I have to I'll lower all the settings to low but keep my resolution correct. Gives a "crisp" picture .

 

i got a 17" 1440x900 but i dont like dropping below 1280x800, i can see the difference in resolution drops

 

I have a 1680x1050 15", and I have to say that there's a noticeable fuzz to the visuals in some games when I drop the resolution - even in the same aspect ration. Though often it depends on the game whether or not it affects me noticeably or not.

 

I've owned a lot of LCDs, and I can't stand any of them out of native resolution, and I stalwartly refuse to go out of aspect ratio (except on nVidia cards, thanks to the fixed aspect ratio scaling). I will sacrifice basically any and all extra features to maintain resolution. It doesn't always work - my T61 simply can't push BioShock acceptably at 1440x900, no matter how low I turn the settings, so I use 960x600 with medium settings. It doesn't look terrible but I can very easily notice it. I can gain a sizable performance increase from running CS:S at 1280x800 with 2xAA as compared to 1440x900, but I actually can see the stretching so clearly I chose 1440x900 anyways. I had to run it at medium-low settings in DirectX 7 mode on my v2000z's x200M (and even still I had to endure occasionally choppy framerates), but to me it was worth it to maintain native resolution. I will upgrade the GPU in my desktop before I use my 1680x1050 LCD out of native resolution (the fact that there are games threatening to force my hand on this is a bad reflection on how terribly coded some modern games are, but that's a different topic). Maybe it's just me, but I can see it very clearly.

 

I found that strategy games and that attack on pearl harbor to look worse when running outside my screen resolution, I think that this have to do with very small things in the attack on pearl harbor(planes very far away), and the somewhat static screens of rts games.
most of the other games look fine in non-native resolutions