Will I be forced to game at 1080p?

[krazy_olie]

My monitor is giving up the ghost, the edid information is now screwed up on both anaolgue and digital, but on analogue I can at least force the resolution and it doesn't look particularly great.
It's a 1440*900 monitor.

If I get a 1080p will I be forced to run everything all games at that resolution? I can probably get away with it graphics wise on most games I think or at least with toning down some settings but just wondering if 1080p monitors actually support lower resolutions properly.

Cheers, Oliver

[oolon]

Simple answer NO, complicated answer is Sort of. LCD monitors have a set number of dots, so to do a lower resolution it could do one of 2 things.
1) Only use part of the monitor, this will result in big black bands on the screen.
2) Interpolation. This is where a new "dot" is created by using the values of the ones near it, this can result in pictures being in soft focus (at best).
Neither of this look as good as what a CRT could do, however a CRT looks worst at the resolution of choice, and takes more power.

[eyezpy]

You will always want to use the native resolution of the monitor, any other resolution will look bad, in games you would rather lower the graphics settings than lower the resolution.

[krazy_olie]

thanks, *weighs up options*

I think it'd be worth the hit on texture quality etc on some games to go 1080p still, it seems to be where the value is. Need for msaa is reduced at that kind of resolution too. The only annoying thing is that I went for my card on the basis that i didn't need to play high resolutions (460 768MB), so the main problem is memory bandwidth and not core power, the higher res uses quite a lot of extra memory so things like v-sync will suffer

[Kumagoro]

I find that if you use a res which is the same aspect ratio then its not as bad as people make it
out to be.

[DanceswithUnix]

I think the short of it is that:

If you are viewing a stationary image, then you can tell it is scaled.
If you are jumping around avoiding rockets, you won't be looking at the slight scaling artefacts you get

When I got my 2048x1152 monitor I was worried about lack of support of the native res in games, but in reality as long as I can find some 16:9 resolution I have always found the result playable.

[krazy_olie]

Thinking about it I imagine it depends on the quality of the upscaler in the monitor. A rubbish hdtv displays SD poorly, whilst a good one displays it well. It can usually display 720p without issue.


now just need to find a suitable monitor!

choosing between
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-SA35.../dp/B004O6ADGW

and

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/255836

or samsung bx2250, which i think is basically the same as the one i posted above but a bit more stylish

[jim]

I tend to find it depends very much on what you're viewing.

Heavy text-based things tend to look pretty terrible at the wrong res, because you don't get the necessary definition on the edges of the letters. A landscape on the other hand you're not going to notice, because it doesn't need very accurate definition around features.

[scaryjim]

My experience is that it depends on the monitor. Some seem to have really good upscaling / interpolation: on my old TV, for instance, old games that had to be run in 800x600 actually looked really crisp even when upscaled to 1280x768

A tft monitor is always going to look sharpest at its native resolution though, and sometimes you'll find that a game will look better at native res with low IQ than at a lower res with high IQ. best advice is probably just to play around and see what happens

[shaithis]

As jim says, it really is down to the monitors scaling ability.....but the new 270 series drivers from nvidia have supposedly taken great strives in doing the job itself. I haven't tried it yet but the feedback at the nv forums seems to be over-whelmingly positive.

There is no reason why a PC shouldn't be able to scale well, a lot of AV nuts have used them for years as dedicated video scalers anyway......just nice to finally see a driver manufacturer taking it seriously.