Quote:For the fun of it, I've seen some ATI technology demo's in 320x200 with 6xFSAA. It is not so bad actually. Again 320 res has sense if you can achieve 50+ fps in there.
Well, I'd like to kill that theory right off the bat. Running in Unreal Tournament on an Athlon XP 1800+/Radeon 9500 system, with everything at stock speeds, here are a few of my findings:
First off, frame rates:
320x240, NoAA: 146.2
320x240, 6x AA: 129.6
1024x768, NoAA: 130.9
1024x768, 6x AA: 120.5
I had planned on posting pics to show the image quality, but I thought that falconfly supported image uploads, he doesn't. Basically, even with the 6x AA, 1024x768 was much better than 320x240, and faster too. 320 has absolutely no sense what so ever.
Quote:High res were really invented as there was a greater need for less jagged lines, and more space for colors, or for design (CAD 80's era). But in the later 90's, high res (1280x960 and more)were only forced into the markets because of the larger monitors where low res are not having the same dot dimensions as intended, and become less comfortable to the eye. For you, it is 50fps+ in QuakeGL on SW render on a 600Mhz CPU. Happy?
No actually I'm not. Higher res's, first off, weren't invented, they simply were be put into the hands of the average consumer in 3D applications. Simulation boxes were doing 1024x768 res long before the consumer got their hands on it, the technology simply wasn't fast enough for the hardware to reliably support it, so support wasn't provided or sought after. But even as far back as the old 1988 Trident ISA card I used to have supported 1024x768 in 2D. Also, where do you get the 600MHz CPU, is that yours? And if you're only getting 50FPS on that, with a game designed to run on a 486 50MHz, I think you need to check that vsync is off.
Quote:Larger monitors can confuse even more, as you can't catch with the eye all the screen, just parts of it. Look at the driver situation in a car. He sees in 1/100 of a sec one part of the road, or the lane next to his right or left. He gets more and more confused as the traffic becomes heavy. Similarly when on a big screen you are playing a game. You must stay at quite a distance to eliminate this effect. This is not so simple if you have a monitor, and you are keeping as usual at a 30-50cm in front of you.
Yeah, great analogy
. The thing that you fail to mention about that is that, like a car, the clearer an approaching image is, the easier it is to make out. If you see a sign at 320x240 resolution, you're going to have to squint like hell to make it out, because you will either have a really tiny screen or a really boxy image (unless you've got a V5 6k with 8x FSAA
), or some of both, whereas with higher resolutions, it can be destinguished easier, even on larger screens. I don't know how much sense that makes, but it makes about as much sense as your analogy does. Also, higher/lower resolutions are much more likely to hurt your eyes, other than doing a bunch of squinting, then low refresh rates are.
Quote:I've seen games in low and high res. Most of them however are not more of a fun when in high res. It's the rest of the game that can make the res a plus in quality. Think textures: if they are jerky, or less polished, what difference does it makes?
I remeber games in low res too. Wing Commander used to be the bomb, at 320 res on my good old 486SX 33MHz, with one of those 3x multiplier things on it, so it worked like a 100MHz. The point is, hardware has evolved, or at least been raised in clock speed to the point where people think that it's evolved. You can't expect to run brand new games at high res and max details with a 600MHz P3?.
More to come...
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