bigger monitor

[TARDH8R]

can anyone tell me if getting a bigger monitor makes the planes bigger in the game.
I have a 19inch now but thinking of getting a 24 inch will it make a diff in the size of the planes I am shooting at.
My eyes is not what they used to be and am hoping I could see the cons better.
 TY for any help you can give

[RATTFINK]

I have a 22" LCD widescreen & it is was bigger then the ± 15" monitor I had  LOL

I believe you can mess areound w/ your res. to make things larger.

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[Laciner]

I've recently gone from a 17" CRT monitor to a 1400x900 widescreen LCD. It's a mixed benefit; I find that when the enemy aircraft are at dot range, they are slightly harder to spot, because they are single-pixel dots, whereas they were blobs on the CRT. However I never have to touch the gamma slider, because everything is much brighter. And I can see a little bit more to the left and right.

Also, if you go for a widescreen monitor, some of the cockpit instruments are harder to see, because they are off the bottom of the screen (the F4U-1A, 1C, and 1D in particular). But that's a widescreen thing.

A 24" monitor of the same aspect ratio and format as a 19" would make the planes seem larger if you were running at the same resolution, but with an LCD this might not be possible; LCDs work best at their native resolution, which would probably be larger with a 24" monitor. In theory it might actually make distant enemies harder to see, because a single-pixel dot would be relatively smaller.

[Krusty]

On widescreen resolutions you gain no left/right view, you lose top/bottom view.

It's cropped, not expanded.

However, that's a minor point, as most wide-screen users don't mind the little bit of lost view.

[RATTFINK]

Originally posted by Krusty


However, that's a minor point, as most wide-screen users don't mind the little bit of lost view.

I don't  

[..........=Ö=..........]

[The Fugitive]

OK, need someone who knows what they are talking about to check this out.

Let say I have a 19" LCD (not wide screen), and native resolution is 1280x1024. I can set the game to the same resolution and be OK.

Now if I change my GAME resolution to 1024x768, everything will "look" bigger, but will I loose the quality in the picture the 512 textures, or the hi-rez texture provide?

Is it better the use the "native resolution" of your monitor in the game as well? Is performance better or it doesn't matter? Is picture quality better, worst?

Please reply in english, for us non-techies  

[RATTFINK]

Please reply in english, for us non-techies

werd!

[Krusty]

Okay.... Say you're working in photoshop, and you need to make a graphic that ends up being 1280x1024.

Ya with me?

You've got lots of options what to use to MAKE that.

Say your source file (Whatever you start editing) is already 1280x1024. That means no resizing. That means it fits perfectly. You see what was there.

However, if you change your mind and use a source that is smaller (1024 or 800 wide) it has to be resized. This means it's re-sampled upwards ("stretched").

If the image were normal-looking before resizing, anti-aliased, whatever, it would look slightly off, maybe blurry, with fine detail not so fine and not so detailed, after the resizing.

Your monitor is the 1280, and the resolution you run it at is the 1024 or 800... The BEST quality is where nothing is resized/stretched, so you set your resolution to the same as the monitor. This is specific to LCDs. CRTs (older non-flatpanel monitors, like TV screens) don't have a "native resolution" and don't have this problem as much.


How was that for clarity?

[RATTFINK]

How was that for clarity?

I need a nap j/k

[The Fugitive]

about as clear as a fog bank off the new england coast !

1280x1024 is Screen size, 1280 pixels wide, by 1024 pixels high. So if that is my "native resolution" I'm guessing that means my LCD works best at that SIZE

Now if Im using the hires pac, and my in game screen size is 1280x1024 and all is well, except Im half blind, so I change my in game screen size to 1024x768. Things in the game will now "look" bigger. The question is, am I loosing some of the picture around the outside of my screen ( still running hi res, so the pictures are coming in at 1280x1024 right? Im not using the whole picture with the smaller screen size) or is the picture being scrunched to fit the screen size.

Will the hires pac not work at a larger screen size?  Never really messed around with this size stuff. Going to have to look into it, might be cheaper than getting new glasses !

[Krusty]

Okay, let me reiterate: Hi-res pack has nothing to do with screensize!


HI-res is *textures* only!! Drop your graphics options texture size down to 128, and check it out. It looks like arse, but everything is the same size on the screen. It has to do with density of pixels ON the objects, not the objects themselves.

Resampling up will lose some quality, yes.
[EDIT: Setting screen resolution to 1024x768 on a LCD with a resolution of 1280x1024 results in resampling up, just to clarify -- it scales the smaller resolution to fit the available pixels.]


I'm not so sure that lowering your resolution makes everything larger. It makes certain parts of the text window, and the radio bar larger, but I think it keeps planes and objects at the same scale. The same % of the screen, that is, where if a plane's wingspan takes up 5% of the total width of a screen, it should still only take up 5% at a lower resolution.

Lower resolutions just means you get less "dots" to make the picture up -- meaning you see LESS, but it's zoomed up to the same size.


It's been a long time since I ran at 800x800, and once I got my LCD I stopped running at 1024x768 because of quality issues (non-native resolution). However, I seem to recall that flight objects you shoot at are the same size in all of the resolutions. (*shrug*)

[Speed55]

I downloaded the hi-res patch a couple of days ago.

Right now i'm running at 1280x1024 during gameplay.

I run my monitor at  1280 x 1024 for desktop applications.

The max resolution for my monitor is 1680 x 1050.

Are you saying to get the most out of the hi-res pack i should run the game at 1680 x 1050 in game?

[Krusty]

hi-res pack has nothing to do with the resolution you play at.


To get the most out of your monitor period (not out of the hi-res pack) you should be using the 1680x1050 resolution, yes.


However, this is a generalization. Not always true, and there are other cases where you can still get the best quality, but I won't go into them here (they deal with display hardware scaling options on your video card)

[Laciner]

"cropped"

Well I never. Unfair advantage out the window.

"I'm not so sure that lowering your resolution makes everything larger."

Actually I'll second that. I've just done screenshots at 1440x900 and 960x600 - the same aspect ratio - and if I enlarge the 960x600 screenshot until it is 1440x900, and flick between the two, the results have the exact same scale, and the 960x600 shot looks as it did when I was running the game. It also looks like Microprose's F-15 Strike Eagle II.

That's an extreme example, though. If I use a slightly lower resolution, such as 1280x768, it doesn't look nearly as bad. But there's nothing to be gained (except for a higher frame rate, because the graphics card has to make fewer pixels).

For fun, here they are (the upsized one second, F-15 Strike Eagle II third):

[Krusty]

You mean that's NOT a real F-15 cockpit?!