Huh? 1080p is nothing with a (relatively) modern video card. I have a GeForce 9800GT and have no problem with 1920x1080 (progressive).
Depends on the game. Playing Fallout 3 in 1920x1080 with that card would be excruciating. I know. I have a GeForce 9800GT as well, and even at 1280x800 I can't keep both detail and frame rate up. Mass Effect 2, on the other hand, runs very smoothly at my monitor's native 1680x1050 and wouldn't, I'd guess, be a problem at 1920x1080.
Here's a sobering fact I just learned on the playstation forums... Most, if not all, the ps3 games are designed for 720p. So if your playing your game at 720p you're really seeing all there is to see.
I suppose I could have a bottleneck elsewhere, but I chose the 9800GT when my old card died largely because it looked to me like my system could make full use of the 9800GT but that any better card would be wasted. What kind of texture/detail/etc. settings are you using?
I've been playing the witcher maxed at 1920 by 1080. Along with nwn Nwn is older but nwn 2 is buggy when it comes to saved games.
Yes and no. In terms of texture detail, yeah you probably won't see anything else up close, however there are a whole lot of other advantages to higher resolutions. For example look at a wall a fair distance from yourself, at a lower resolution you will be able to see less detail while at higher resolution it will be sharper. Greater geometry detail can be seen at distance, and also you can't underestimate the impact of improved image quality. Have you ever seen screenshots/video of PS2 or Wii games running at high resolution through an emulator? Makes a massive improvement. Seems to me like you just said that you have a bottleneck, the rest of your system. What are your specs?
The problem with your wall analogy is that's for a picture of a real thing. We're not talking about real things, we're talking about man made graphics. There are no more details to see beyond 720p because noone made them. And I haven't noticed any kind of perspective detail issues at all. I'm not sure if you could really even tell a difference.
Not really... I have a machine with a Core2Duo E6600 and a nVidia GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB, which is actually pretty slow by todays standards (got the parts about 2.5 years ago). I run all my games at 1920x1200, usually with anti alias (although not always). I haven't tried the craziest games like Crysis though. My machine is in the sweet spot where it is just quite fast enough to run any "Cross-platform" game at 1920x1200. By that I mean, any of the games that are being released on xbox360, ps3, and PC. Anyway, you definitely don't need anything special to play games at 1920x1080+ these days...
I don't know about pc gaming but I found the following useful quotes about ps3 gaming. So I'd say if your playing some multi-platform game, it's probably worthless to play it on anything higher than 720p.
Any better card and my system would be a distinct bottleneck, but I don't think the system is much of a bottleneck with this card. Pentium D dual core 3GHz, 3 GB memory (not sure the specs on the memory, but it was good when I got it about 4 years ago.) The computer's power supply just barely meets the minimum recommended for the card, so I suppose that might be an issue if the recommendation is on the low side. The 9800GT is definitely a huge improvement over the 8500GT it replaced. Most games I play are now pretty smooth at maxed out settings, and 720p video plays without a hitch, neither of which was close to the case before. Maybe my system's more of a bottleneck than I think it is, or I could just be more annoyed than most by midgame changes in frame-rate. Either way, Fallout 3 on maxed settings runs with noticeably more stutter than anything else I've played, and the card was a cheap special on newegg so I'm happy with it.
Well, my monitors native resolution is also 1080p,but i use 1440x900... I have as CPU a AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5000+ (2 CPUs), ~2.6GHz and a 9500 GT videocard which is, i think, right now the entry-level DX10/PhysX card on the market... I also have 3 GB ram... So i can play most games at 1080 without too much stutter, but i just don't see the improvement of it in terms of graphics... I still use the better textures and fx...
I run every game at 1920x1200 and usualy have all gfx options up full. Thats on a GTX 260, one of the slower ones (although overclocked to faster than most shop spec ones now) from when they were first released. Its good enough for now
4 gig of ram athlon dual core at +5200 ayt 2.7 gz. I have a gforce 9500 gs or gt with 512 meg of ram i can run most games maxed only game i have a bit of a problem with stuttering is fo3.
PC games don't work that way. For optimization purposes most console games tend to run at one locked resolution and if they support outputting in other resolutions will do so by rendering at their native resolution (such as 720p) and then scaling that image. For pc games, if you tell a game to render at 1080p it will render at that resolution (unless it is spectacularly badly made) Sounds like you are bringing a movie type thinking into games. Let's say you are close to a wall that has a 512*512 pixel texture on it and is filling the screen. If you are at a resolution like 720p you will be able to discern every pixel of that texture. Now walk away from the wall. You will soon reach a point where the resolution of the wall onscreen is smaller than the resolution of the texture, meaning that you will start losing smaller details. Have you ever looked at promo screenshots of games and wondered why they look so smooth and better looking than on your television? That is usually because the images have been rendered out at a really high resolution and then scaled down. As an example, here are a couple of screenshots of Wii games, now remember that the Wii renders all its games at a maximum of 480p. These shots look really awesome because they are actually running through an emulator on PC which isn't just rendering at the games native resolution and then scaling the image up, it is actually rendering at a high resolution. If you look at the texture on the ground in the first shot you might notice that the textures low resolution stands out. That is a symptom of what you are describing. The texture there was designed to work at that camera distance in 480p resolution, so rendering the game at a higher resolution gives no benefit. However the fact it stands out does prove that the higher resolution rendering is increasing the quality of other elements in the scene. More specifically to high end stuff, here are some multiplatform screenshots: Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Assassins Creed 2: Mirrors Edge:
Wait, weren't Assassins Creed 2 and Mirrors Edge both rendered in 720 to begin with? I mean I see your point. But without side by side comparisons it's hard to get a whole lot out of those pics. I still think 1080p gaming is a myth (Much like 75% of all 1080p media in general). I'd wager that if someone came over your house and you were playing in 720 but told your friend it was 1080 they'd be like "WOW that looks great", and if you were playing in 1080 but told your friend it was 720 they be like "Man that doesn't look so good". Beauty seems to be in the mind of the beholder - ESPECIALLY when it comes to HD gaming.
Mirrors Edge is rendered at 720p on consoles, but I think you are still thinking too much of watching movies, on PC there is no such thing as the resolution it was rendered in begin with. The difference between 1080p and 720p can be hard to see on a television with a movie, but it's actually fairly easy to see with a game. Notice I keep on mentioning image quality, that can't be understated. You can 100% see the difference between 720p and 1080p while gaming on a monitor, the only exception could be if you were running with various settings like AA and AF filtering maxed out, then it would be a bit harder as they improve the image quality a lot. It's really one of those things you don't notice until it's not there. A bit like the low resolution and jaggy edges on last gen games.
It took a while to get used to it... I use 1680x1050 screen-resolution for windows and games since this weekend... Tried 1080, but it's too big for my taste, might be because stuff like menus and font's dont get upscaled properly... I have it hooked up with DVI too...
This doesn't make any sense if you think about it. Do you think a video game is a bunch of film containing every possible situation you could get yourself into in the game? For most modern games, there'd be essentially an infinite amount of footage required to do something like this. Each frame is rendered in real time, while you are playing it. This is why CGI in movies can be so much better than what you see in video games... they get to spend hours rendering a single frame, and then show the same series of frames to everyone. With a video game, what happens on screen is dynamic, and could be arbitrarily different depending on what the player does. Now, the articles you were linking to earlier are talking about consoles, which generally always render to the same resolution for a given game. So maybe games are rendered under 720p even, and then scaled up. But even then, they are still rendered on the fly. Most all PC games (although not 100% of them) will render to whatever resolution the user selects. This means I can play an oldish game, like counter-strike: source (2004), and actually have it rendered at 2560x1600 (or even higher) if my monitor supports it. Or I could buy a brand new game and have it rendered at 800x600 if my computer was slow. Consoles don't give the user the option to configure what resolution to render at, because they know everyone has the same hardware, so they know which resolution is going to work reliably. On a computer however, the customers all have wildly different specs on their computers. This means that the quality and resolution have to be adjustable in order to be able to sell it to a wide market.
A quick thank you to everyone in this thread. You got me to stop and think about possible bottlenecks that were keeping my video card from performing optimally. The card had been cheep to buy, my system seemed to meet the specs, and the card was a huge upgrade in performance so that I hadn't really thought much about the fact that it might not be working quite right. Anyway, my power supply was the most marginal spec and seemed like the most likely culprit. I found a $35 upgrade with decent reviews that boosted power 20%, and it seems to have made a real difference. I haven''t reinstalled Fallout 3 yet, but I tested it maxing out AA on some other games and playing back hi def video in VLC with maxed out post-processing, and the improvement was quite noticeable. So thanks to all of you who got me thinking about looking for a cheap upgrade.
Well, I gave Fallout 3 a try. Turns out I have to revert to a pretty old version of the graphics drivers or anti-aliasing causes lots of truly hideous crashes. Still, with the old drivers (forceware 178.24) the game runs reasonably well with everything that I want to be maxed out maxed out, with a few hi res mods running, and with 4XAA. So thanks again!
