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Mad Poster
Original Poster
#1 Old 20th Mar 2016 at 1:30 PM
Default What screen resolution do you play in?
For me, my game looks best at 1920x1080 (highest) but for performance I went through and tried every resolution to see what the lowest would be that I could play in. 1600x900 seems to be that sweet spot (the lowest) that also covers the whole screen. I'm playing on a 24 inch dell monitor. I'm curious what monitors and resolutions you're playing on, and your experience with performance when it comes to resolution.
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Scholar
#2 Old 20th Mar 2016 at 4:19 PM
I still use my original monitor, which is a Gateway 15 inch LCD that only supports 1024x768. Now I know some people will mock me for using something so old and crappy, but hey if it ain't broke don't fix it and so far this thing has lasted for at least 15 years. Though to be honest if I had a long enough HDMI cable I'd probably play on my TV.
One Minute Ninja'd
#4 Old 20th Mar 2016 at 10:04 PM
LCD monitors really will look best when run at their native resolution. So if you have a 1920X1080 monitor, that's the best way to go. While you can certainly use another resolution such as 1600X900 and maintain full "coverage", the pixels rendered will be interpolated, which will lower image quality. It might be "kinder" on your video card to run it at the lower resolution, and perhaps give you a bit better fps, the trade off will be a softer image. If you have a contemporary video card, you really should be fine running at the native 1920X1080.

The screens where different resolutions could be displayed without a trade off of quality for frame rates (up to the native resolution) were the old CRT monitors. There were no "fixed" pixels on a CRT screen, so scaling was fine to balance off resolution vs. performance. But with a fixed pixel screen like an LCD, which is certainly the dominant tech these days, staying with the native resolution will yield the best quality.

Which includes that old Gateway (gee, I loved Gateway back in the day when they were online only, and each machine was built to your spec. And the cute cow box design they shipped in.....)
Scholar
#5 Old 20th Mar 2016 at 11:01 PM
Quote: Originally posted by eskie227
Which includes that old Gateway (gee, I loved Gateway back in the day when they were online only, and each machine was built to your spec. And the cute cow box design they shipped in.....)
I remember getting my original Gateway (which was my first computer as well) from a store they had in my area, though the PC itself was built to my liking which was really nice. Another nice thing about it was that it was before all this lame trial software came included with retail PCs, because every piece of software included were full retail versions. One piece of software was this thing called The Sims or something like that, maybe some of you have heard of it.
Top Secret Researcher
#6 Old 21st Mar 2016 at 7:26 AM
Native for me is 1920 x 1200, but I play TS3 in a window of 1920 x 1080.
I take loads and loads of screenshots and I've found, since I don't know in advance how I might later want to crop them, that it's best I start with plenty of resolution.
Mad Poster
Original Poster
#7 Old 21st Mar 2016 at 12:15 PM
Quote: Originally posted by haywud
I still use my original monitor, which is a Gateway 15 inch LCD that only supports 1024x768. Now I know some people will mock me for using something so old and crappy, but hey if it ain't broke don't fix it and so far this thing has lasted for at least 15 years. Though to be honest if I had a long enough HDMI cable I'd probably play on my TV.


Before I bought my new monitor, I had a bulky 17 inch acer monitor. It wasn't even LCD! Pretty much from 2003 - That's a reason to be laughed at. I had to get rid of it because the screen kept going blue :p
Scholar
#8 Old 21st Mar 2016 at 5:38 PM
Quote: Originally posted by christmas fear
Before I bought my new monitor, I had a bulky 17 inch acer monitor. It wasn't even LCD! Pretty much from 2003 - That's a reason to be laughed at. I had to get rid of it because the screen kept going blue :p
I don't think that's a reason to be laughed at at all! The way I look at things is that there's no real reason to replace something that still works fine. It wasn't until last year that I finally got rid of my old CRT TV, because hey it still worked and looked good enough for me. Unless there's really no choice I don't usually replace something just because there's a newer version, even if the new is better. That would be like getting rid of a 427 Shelby Cobra (Google it, awesome car) just because it's old and some new car has better features.
Mad Poster
#9 Old 21st Mar 2016 at 6:03 PM Last edited by Grijze Pilion : 21st Mar 2016 at 6:54 PM.
1920x1200 is what I play on, but if I want a screenshot to look really nice I'll bump up the resolution to 2560x1600. That's risky though, since the AO and the FXAA and the other stuff is already stressing my GPU (GTX 650) a fair bit. My other PC can easily run the game at 3840x2160, but that's seriously impractical due to the tiny UI.

As for my monitor, it's a Samsung SyncMaster T240 from 2008-ish. The bezels are a bit fat though, my desk probably wouldn't fit two of them. Which is why my second monitor is a SyncMaster 930BF from 2005, which might be old and narrow, but the picture quality's still excellent - as is to be expected, this is Samsung we're talking about. They have a thing for making good panels.

But anyway - this PC isn't gonna see the end of the year, so maybe I'll go ahead and get new monitors with the new build as well. My setup isn't half bad, but after 3 years of browsing /r/PCMasterRace I'm really feeling left out on this fancy PC gaming stuff they have these days.

insert signature here
( Join my dumb Discord server if you're into the whole procrastination thing. But like, maybe tomorrow. )
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