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Quarterly Producer Letter for Q2 2024 ×

Does lowering your resolution...


MarkusAtticus

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You have to test it yourself, but lowering resolution from lets say full HD 1920 x 1080 to something less, lets say 1680 x 1050 wide, should improve performance on a medium quality machine. Edited by Vlacke
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Yes, a higher resolution always impacts game performance hence the reason why some video cards can't even get to the max resolution. My monitors resolution is 1440X900 and my brothers is alot higher. I have much better performance than he does. But I have a better pc also. Just play around with it and try to find a good ratio between performance and how it looks. Some resolutions will make it look too wide/small - crappy lol.
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In theory it can affect performance more than any other adjustment...

 

But something to keep in mind is that LCD monitors have a 'Native Resolution': this is the actual physical resolution of the monitor, the actual number of physical pixels it actually has. If you use any other resolution than the native resolution, it has to use Interpolation to display it, which is almost certainly going to introduce artifacts.

 

In theory it wouldn't if the native resolution was a multiple of the resolution you were using, but for 1920x1080 that'd be 960x540...which is stupidly small.

 

For that reason it's a good idea to leave it on your native resolution unless you absolutely cannot for some reason.

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Yes, a higher resolution always impacts game performance hence the reason why some video cards can't even get to the max resolution. My monitors resolution is 1440X900 and my brothers is alot higher. I have much better performance than he does. But I have a better pc also. Just play around with it and try to find a good ratio between performance and how it looks. Some resolutions will make it look too wide/small - crappy lol.

 

yeah im noticing lol id rather it lack fps the look at this

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yeah im noticing lol id rather it lack fps the look at this

 

Well the other settings likely to give a boost in FPS if turned down are these(not necessarily in order):

 

Shadows (Disproportionately HUGE impact for some reason, may be CPU-only for some unknown reason, try this one first)

Shaders

Bloom

Anisotropic Filtering

 

Texture quality should only cause problems if you don't have enough Video RAM for the setting you've chosen (barring the 'can't read it off the hard drive fast enough' problem the super-high textures apparently have...which could be largely solved if they were just loaded into VRAM to start with!)

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I lowered my 24inch 1920x1200 to several of the lower settings. You get better fps but

the interpolation makes the total picture look fuzzy. It gets worse as you go down.

Playing this game on low settings is not an option for me it looks like crap.

 

In general however, for optimal image quality you should increase any resolution setting to the maximum possible - whether in a game, or in Windows - as this matches your LCD monitor's native resolution and provides the crispest possible image.

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I lowered my 24inch 1920x1200 to several of the lower settings. You get better fps but

the interpolation makes the total picture look fuzzy. It gets worse as you go down.

Playing this game on low settings is not an option for me it looks like crap.

 

In general however, for optimal image quality you should increase any resolution setting to the maximum possible - whether in a game, or in Windows - as this matches your LCD monitor's native resolution and provides the crispest possible image.

 

If you managed to get it down to 960x600 somehow (not a real setting that I've ever seen), in theory you'd lose the interpolation entirely. It'd still look crappy because of the resolution being so low, but you'd get blocks of 4 physical pixels perfectly corresponding to each logical pixel, so the interpolation wouldn't be an issue, at least in theory.

 

Barring that, yes, the interpolation is going to screw things up if you don't use your native resolution (which is almost always the highest res it reports to windows it's capable of)

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It depends on your rig. I mean, in theory, yes, it's easier for your graphics card to fill a lower-res image. But newer graphics cards have an abundance of power so that they can do things like display on multiple screens at once. So if you're on an older rig you might see a fairly noticeable gain from reducing resolution, but on a newer machine, you might gain 5 FPS (if that.)

 

1920 x 1080 (1080P) is the standard, so most games are being developed to provide smooth framerates at that resolution.

Edited by Mannic
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