Downscaling from 1080 to 720?

Well I think that is what you call it.

But anyways, I'm getting a new gaming laptop, my only concern, as stupid as it sounds, is the 1080p screen.

You see, I have two laptops right now, one is a 15" 1280x720, and it has an okay graphics cards, but runs games pretty decently because of the low resolution.

I'm afraid that the GTX 460M in the new laptop will not be able to keep up with 1080p on a few games, so I think I will play it at a lower resolution.

The thing is, when I run games at this resolution on the same size screen, will it look more blurry on a higher native resolution screen?

The 1280x720 looked fine and sharp while playing games at that resolution.
Will the 1920x1080 look just as good when running at 720p resolution? Or will it look more blurry because of the higher native resolution, and the upscaling will not work out well?

 

It will look blurred out at any non-native resolution (unless you want to go and force 960x540 which is exactly half) but It's not going to be as bad as you think it might be (unless you're sensitive to that).

I don't remember how well this works, but you could take a screenshot in game at your current native resolution, and then upscale it to 1920x1080 using a photo editor, and see how it looks on your current monitor...

 

Running a game at non-native resolution will always result blurry image on almost any laptop screen, if the 460M can't handle the game at 1080p with high settings, you can always lower the graphic details before you are forced to play at a lower resolution. 460M is one of the best mobile cards on the market and should have no problem with most games at 1080p with max or fairly high details on. But if you want to keep playing games at your laptop screen's native resolution as long as possible, you might want to consider a 900p screen(1600x900), I find it's a better choice than 1080p screen if your primary interest with your laptop is gaming.

 

But why?

The screen is the same size, so shouldn't it look the same?

The 1080p just has a higher density of pixels, so maybe one pixel of green on the 720p would be two pixels on the 1080p, but wouldn't it look the same?

 

Because unless they're exact multiples (like the 960x540, which is exactly half of 1920x1080) it won't be 1 pixel of green on the 720p being 2 pixels on the 1080p, but more like 1 pixel of green on the 720p being 1 and a half pixels of green on the 1080p. Now, since you can't have half a pixel due to the way these screens are constructed, they'll usually end up having half the pixels go one way, and the other half go the other way... which results in the blurring. Or you can think of it this way. You have 2 columns of balls, one red and one blue like this:

red blue
red blue
red blue
red blue

This results in a nice straight line. Now, if you try to scale that up by 50% (which is what happens when you go from 720p to 1080p) you end up with 3 columns of apples, and if you try to keep an even number of greens and reds on each side, you get something like this:

red red blue
red blue blue
red red blue
red blue blue
red red blue
red blue blue

You see how that middle line has to flip back and forth? This causes the blurring. Now, with an exact multiple (like if you went from 720p to a theoretical 1440p), you can have exact lines again like so:

red red blue blue
red red blue blue
red red blue blue
red red blue blue

 

1080p won't be a problem for the GTX 460M. The majority of games will play on high settings at 1080p without issues.

Also, 960x540 is actually a quarter of 1920x1080 if you do the math. (When you reduce both multiples by half, you actually quarter the result.) I believe that 1366x768 is actually the closest standard 16:9 resolution to half of 1080p.

 

city: it doesn't matter if it's half, but that the width and height have to be reduced (or increased) by a factor of two. so no, 960x540 it is. anything else results in interpolated mix-pixels, ergo loss of sharpness.

 

And making 4 pixels represent one pixel won't reduce sharpness?

 

No more than the lower resolution already does...things are aligning at least. The problem of blurriness occurs when the virtual pixels edges aren't aligning with physical pixel edges.

OP: I bought my current notebook in 1600x900 res (instead of 1080P) for exactly the reasons you are concerned about. Just as an FYI, my 5870 cant play SC2 on the settings I like (and with the framerate I like) in higher resolution than that (I played SC2 on an external in 1920 by 1080 res, and it was brutal compared to my native resolution, I was dropping to 20-30 FPS with lots of models on screen, and I cant stand lower than about 40FPS).

In the end: EVERY PIXEL PROPORTIONALLY REDUCES FRAMERATE. ie: Add 50% more pixels, and your framerate is 67% of what it was before.

I disagree with CityPig. A 460 will not run games "fine" in 1080P (although a "fine" framerate is for the user to decide). A 5870 outperforms a 460, and I still didn't go with 1080P, so you know where I stand. I think 1080P screens are great for productivity and movies, but for gamers, I recommend lower (unless you have some crazy SLI/Xfire config).

 

are you sure the 460m will give you problems? it even can run crysis in high settings (thats 1080p) at 52fps -- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460M - Notebookcheck.net Tech

 

if you don't scale by powers of two, you will have to interpolate ALL the pixels. if you scale by power of two, you can actually use origininal pixel values. so yes, it will reduce sharpness, but the least amount of it.

basic signal and aliasing theory (nyquist theorem and similar, or how ever spelled)

 

only game i have had a problem at non native res was empire total war. That games menus looked horrible at 720p. Now every other game i haven't had a problem.

 

I realize that, but at that point would the difference really be big enough to make up for how tiny that resolution is?

And again, none of this matters because the 460M handle 1080p just fine on almost all games, and probably will continue to be able to for the next year at least.

 

well, it happens to be, that a dvd movie is more sharp than a 720p movie when watched on a 1080p screen in more than one case. or in the case of having a 1080p movie, and rendering it to 720p, and the watching it on a 1080p screen again is essentially like watching a dvd.

because for the scaledown, only each 3rd pixel in height (9th pixel in the square, then) will be 1:1 what it was. all others will be blurred interpolated inbetweens, thus rather unsharp.