Poll: Resolution or effects/FPS for PC gaming?

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bobdevis

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Jul 22, 2010
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Max resolution with low to medium effects. Even if I can run everything with max effects I usually don't.


I want to see what is going on faster. Blur and extra lighting or glow just distracts you from the action.
 
Jul 27, 2009
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ATI radeon 4870, 19" Dell LCD monitor, 1280x1024 res. all graphics settings maxxed. Almost always 60 fps...if not, turn down shadows. easy fix
 

The Lost Big Boss

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Sep 3, 2008
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Native resolution no matter what, if it is not at that the game looks like my morning glory. My specs
i5-750 Lynnfield 2.66GHz (over clocking this week)
4.00 gigs of DDR3-1333
Asus maximus iii formula (MB)
8800 GTX (Huge bottleneck, my GTX285 broke two times so I am going to get the ATI 5850 and just overclock it to a 5870.

The GPU is showing it's age, it is four years old, and because of NVIDIA fucking me up the ass I am four generations behind.

So most games I can run on high, but games like crysis and BFBC2 is stuck at medium for the time being. My resolution is 1900 x 1200 no matter what.
 

viranimus

Thread killer
Nov 20, 2009
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Really really depends.

Games like shooters, you need every split second to survive, so the adage of Lag = Frag comes into play. (besides it really isnt like (most) shooters are notable for their beautiful lush environments. (obvious exclusions such as crysis and farcry)

Effects, dependent on what effects. Shadows always seem worthless to me, excessive lighting and bloom is the same.

If its a game where the enviroments are part of the allure of the game, then a few frames per second is an easy sacrifice to make (environment such as Risen; but my god not the char mods)

Honestly... I played for the longest time on a PC that should have been in the smithsonian had it not been salvaged and frankencomp'd 6 ways from sunday, but now that i have a decent (IE 2 years old good) Pc, I rarely drop anything below 1900x1080 reso any more.

Reso makes it pretty and more crips, which adds too much to the visual appeal of anything, effects are just.. pretties. So I say, turn the reso up where you can, dump the effects where you can in order to strike a balance of FPS.
 

Nalgas D. Lemur

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Nov 20, 2009
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jamesworkshop said:
I'm talking about Dx.10 GPU's (8800 series onwards) that were released after the 7th generation of consoles, i'm not talking about the Graphic processors inside the consoles like the PS3's RSX chip.

In PC land 1280x1024 is a tiny resolution compared to the 5760x1200 I see running at the high end today
In that case, yeah, absolutely. 1280x1024 has been small for many, many years. 1600x1200 wasn't unusual for high end setups ten years ago, which is why a bunch of PC people were wondering what the big deal was about 720p or even 1080p for consoles. I mean, even 1024x768 is nearly as many pixels as 720p, and that was pretty standard even for mid-range stuff forever and a half ago.
 

ZephrC

Free Cascadia!
Mar 9, 2010
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I've been trying to play games my hardware couldn't support since trying to run Apple IIe games on my Apple II+. I really got into it with trying to run Doom and other similar games on my poor old 486SX.

Because of that I don't even notice lousy framerate anymore, and high resolution it never worth the effort, so I usually just turn up the effects until it becomes an unplayable slideshow, then turn them back down a smidge.
 

veloper

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Jan 20, 2009
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unless you still got a CRT, you should always play at the native resolution of your monitor.

Drop anti-aliasing and DoF and bloom first, then lose the other effects.
 

aaron552

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Jun 11, 2008
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If you have an LCD and can't get an acceptable frame rate at native resolution, you need a better PC.

What is "acceptable" in terms of frame rate depends very much on the game. For shooters, I want the FPS to not drop below your refresh rate (usually 60Hz) and to be VSynced. For other games, I'm willing to let the framerate drop to around 30fps average in exchange for shiny effects.

My PC is starting to struggle with newer games now, overclocking has only delayed the inevitable. For a 3-year-old PC, it's not too bad: Core 2 Duo 6550 (overclocked from 2.33GHz to 3.2GHz) 4GB DDR2 RAM (overclocked from 800MHz to 1GHz) and 512MB Radeon 3870 (this is where the main bottleneck is, I think). Regardless, once I can't run games on high settings at native resolution (1680x1050) anymore, I will probably buy a new PC.
 

Ezahn

The Werepianist
Jul 26, 2010
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Well, I will attempt my first overclock when my PC will start to struggle at 1400x900.
Only problem is: I don't have any idea on how to overclock. ^^