On 16/01/2011 04:47, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
There's two reasons it's good for games:
1. Like you indicated, to get a better framerate. Framerate is more
important in most games than resolution.
This reason was valid at least at some point in time, for me it actually
hold me back from transitioning from CRTs to LCDs for some time. But
nowadays the screen resolutions have stabilized (stopped increasing, in
terms of DPI), and graphics cards have improved in power enough that you
can play nearly any game with the LCDs native resolution with max
framerate, so no worries with this anymore (you may have to tone down
the graphics settings a bit in some cases, but that is fine with me)
2. For games that aren't really designed for multiple resolutions,
particularly many 2D ones, and especially older games (which are often some
of the best, but they look like shit on an LCD).
Well, if your LCD supports it, you have the option of not expanding the
screen if output resolution is not the native one. How good or bad that
would be, depends on the game I guess.
I actually did this some years ago on certain (recent) games for a some
time, use only 1024×768 of the 1280x1024 native, to have better framerate.
It's not a problem for me for old games, since most of them that I
occasionally play are played in console emulator. DOS games
unfortunately were very hard to play correctly in XP in the first place
(especially with soundblaster), so it's not a concern for me.
PS: here's a nice thread for anyone looking to purchase a new LCD:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=39226
It explains a lot of things about LCD technology, and ranks several LCDs
according to intended usage (office work, hardcore gaming, etc.).
--
Bruno Medeiros - Software Engineer
