Question for large LCD owners: can you play games in a smaller window ?

[whistleclient]

This is hypothetical question. If you own a 30" Apple Cinema Display or a Dell 3007WFP, but your video card couldn't push enough pixels to play Battlefield 2 at that resolution, could you play the game in a smaller 1280x1024 window inside the 2560x1600 to keep your framerate up?

 

[wpeng]

Yup. If you go into your advanced options in your video drivers, there is an option to not scale the image or to display a 1:1 image. You will get the image with black bars all around. I guess that's not really a window, but at least there isn't any scaling...

 

[Fox5]

I don't really mind scaling, so long as the aspect ratio stays the same. It sort of gives it a TV like blur effect so it's bareable, especially if you're not sitting that close or paying too much attention to the details but instead just to the overall motion.

 

[NoStateofMind]

That's why CRT's will rule til they 'catch up'. LCD's are good for normal stuff, just not perfect for everything.

 

[whistleclient]

does it increase your frame rates, or is it about the same, as the video card is technically still pumping out 2560x1600 (even though some is black bars)?

 

[Fox5]

Originally posted by: tangent1138


does it increase your frame rates, or is it about the same, as the video card is technically still pumping out 2560x1600 (even though some is black bars)?

It does increase framerates. It costs nothing to do black bars. Stretching costs performance, though modern video cards may have dedicated hardware to handle that. Back on an old Vaio laptop, enabling stretching had a horrible performance hit, I'm guessing the cpu was used to do the interpolation or whatever since that was pre T&L and just about the start of the days that video cards could stretch an image instead of leave it bordered.