Low resolution gaming than native resolution?

I

icondxm

n00b
Joined
Jan 8, 2010
Messages
13
I want to buy a $180 22" TN monitor with native resolution of 1920x1080, aspect ratio of 16:9. My budget is good enough for a ATI 5770 GPU strictly. I want to know if i play games at 1280x1024 or 1680x1050 to gain some frames will it be ok? Will the image quality be sacrificed? Will i see black bars on top and bottom? I am only allowed to play games at native resolution?
 
The image quality will be greatly sacrificed. Unless you run the game in windowed mode so it appears in a box on your screen instead of scaling the full display.
 
Just run it in a 16:9 resolution. Computer monitors are pretty good at scaling stuff, in most games with all the movement i doubt the quality is so bad that you will lose any sleep over it.
 
At least with an ATI card you can run a lower resolution and have the image centered on your screen (with black borders around it). Or you can simply have it stretch the image to fit the whole screen, whichever you like best.

I'm a bit in the same situation as you (I have a HD5750), and I play the more demanding games at 1280x1024 (with black borders). It works out quite well for me, as I don't care for the extra width anyway (not at the cost of framerates). Stretching the image is the worse option for me, as the image inevitably loses some of its sharpness.
 
I wouldn't bother playing games while running an lcd monitor at a non-native resoultion. Its just not worth it. You would be better off running the game at the lcd's native resolution and turning down some of the eye candy (e.g. anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, etc...).

When I first got my 1600x1200 res lcd, I ended up figuring out that I got better image quality doing that rather than changing the resolution. There was a pretty good review, recently, of the gtx460 on anandtech that had a round up of a dozen cards or so showing what they could do with various resolutions and levels of eye candy. Good luck.
 
Merlini said:
At least with an ATI card you can run a lower resolution and have the image centered on your screen (with black borders around it). Or you can simply have it stretch the image to fit the whole screen, whichever you like best.

I'm a bit in the same situation as you (I have a HD5750), and I play the more demanding games at 1280x1024 (with black borders). It works out quite well for me, as I don't care for the extra width anyway (not at the cost of framerates). Stretching the image is the worse option for me, as the image inevitably loses some of its sharpness.
Click to expand...

Even still, I've found that GPU scaling on NVIDIA cards and especially on ATi's recent offerings is far better than any monitor's scaling capability that I have seen yet.

If you have to drop below native resolutions, GPU scaling FTW.
 
Mr. Bluntman said:
Even still, I've found that GPU scaling on NVIDIA cards and especially on ATi's recent offerings is far better than any monitor's scaling capability that I have seen yet.

If you have to drop below native resolutions, GPU scaling FTW.
Click to expand...

How does one make use of GPU scaling instead of monitor scaling?
 
In drivers Nvidia have 4 options:

- use display scalling
- scale to full screen (always full picture)
- scale keeping aspect ratio (black bars on sides if picture was 4:3)
- do not scale (black bars around picture)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top