Author Topic: which resolution is best? (Read 450 times)

udet · « **on:** February 20, 2003, 12:45:13 PM »

I heard something about this: that if you keep your game's resolution above the resolution of the desktop you get better frame rate. I play at 640x480 and my desktop is at 800x600. I switched desktop to 640x490 and didn't notice any improvenet. Should I keep desktop at 800x600 and play at 1024x768?
I have a crappy system with a crappy 733 Celeron and a crappy 4mb onboard Intel video card, but I have 256mb of RAM.

akak · « **Reply #1 on:** February 21, 2003, 06:02:18 AM »

I'm playing at 1600x1200x32bit and have been seeing better frame rates at this resolution than I did when I had it at 1024x768x32bit. One plus is that I don't have to have to bother with enabling FSAA since everything looks smooth at 1600x1200.

ack-ack

bockko · « **Reply #2 on:** February 21, 2003, 09:16:57 AM »

udet i don't believe you will see significant improvement by changing desktop res. If you could afford a pci video card you will probably see better results than the 4meg onboard. Try a Gforce 2 or 3 PCI bus card, AGP if you have an AGP slot (AGP is much faster, use it if you have it). Even an entry level card will help you much.

bockk

icemaw · « **Reply #3 on:** February 21, 2003, 01:01:21 PM »

What will help with frame rate and desktop res is. After you choose your desktop res check what mhz your monitor is running at. On my system I have a 128 meg readeon card. Was very disapointed after I installed and set up the card and desk top res. I chose a very high res and my monitor was only able to run it at 50mghz I was getting 50fps in the game when alone and in the 10s when around the fight. I changed my desktop res lowered it to 1024X768 this allowed me to up refresh rate to 100mhz. Back in game I get 80 90 fps now when alone and 30 40 when in a big fight. It bottoms out around 20 at a large field that is complety destroyed smoking with lots of planes around.

spiffykraits · « **Reply #4 on:** February 21, 2003, 02:57:17 PM »

Your onboard video card is not up to the job - 8MBs is very low these days, I would suggest a separate video card of 32MBs as the minimum investment, there are some fairly reasonable ones about now as most folk are fitting 64MB and 128MB vid cards. Quite often on-board video mother boards don't have AGP slots, if yours has an AGP slot available get an AGP one, if not get a PCI board and disable the on-board one in bios.

This would give an improvement but your CPU is marginal also, and most fps increases come from a faster CPU feeding an adequate video card. The CPU speed has more influence than the video board as long as the 3d vid card is reasonable. It wouldn't be worth spending too much dosh on a super video card without upgrading the CPU as well I'm afraid.