Tech Report play with insane resolutions

[Steve]

Imagine being asked by your readers to grab some 7800 GTX SLI benchmarks at 2048x1536. Sounds fair, given just how fast a pair of the little beggars can be. Still, when it requires you to purchase a new monitor, you know you're either dedicated, or slightly mad.

Luckily, the results of TR's tests lead to more than just a few charts and results. The 7800 GTX seemed to have an exceptional performance advantage over its other high-end brethren. Suspiciously so, in fact. In their quest for answers, TR discovered from ATi and then nVidia that the greatest reason for the performance differential is the size of the Hierarchical Z buffer. HiZ speeds up rendering by ignoring polygons that won't be displayed on screen. However, at uber-high resolutions, the entire frame won't fit into the HiZ buffer, so part of the frame will lack HiZ optimization... unless you're running a 7800 GTX.

At the end of the day, performance at 2048x1536 isn't really a good indicator of relative rendering power or likely performance in future games, but it is a very interesting special case. For what it's worth, it seems to me that the Radeon X850 XT PE scales up a little more gracefully than the GeForce 6800 Ultra most of the time, although neither card handles uber-res modes as well as the 7800 GTX. The GeForce 6800 Ultra SLI rig, in particular, suffers mightily at three megapixels, so that you're almost better off with a single 7800 GTX.

An interesting read for the polygon heads out there, but don't all go rushing to buy 22" monitors at once - somebody will do their back in.

[Rys]

Great stuff from Damage. I'm remiss at not being able to write something similar, but my best monitor stops at 1600x1200. Hurray for LCDs, but boo at being too poor to get myself a Dell 2405

[oralpain]

I've had monitors capable of doing 2048x1536 for 4 years and several older games are playable at such resolutions, so this is nothing new to me really.

Now, if I could get a good refresh rate at such resolutions, I'd really be itching for a 7800GTX.

[Rave]

Yeah, but to display a 2048x1536 picture properly a CRT with a visible screen area of 21" (which I guess most 22" screens are) would need to have a dot pitch of less than .21mm. Do they exist?