In alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt "BobR"
Coffee Lover said:
I got my resolution AS high as possible right now.
I read/heard the higher the resolution, you get a drop in performance?
1280 X 1024 right now, what's a good one for performance?
Or does it matter????????
I see there are (as of yet) no programmers in this thread!
[ assume byte == 8 bits ]
Think about what the poor ol' CPU has to do (assuming your video card/MB has
no extra performance features).
640x480x4(bytes (32bits)) == 307200 x4 == 1228800.
.... and it has to do that 60 times a second to be flicker free:
times 60Hz == 73728000 bytes per second.
1280x1024 == 1310720x4 == 5242880
times 60Hz == 314572800 bytes per second.
How could it not affect preformance?
Easy.
You're assuming (and we all know what ass-u-me does) that the processor
has to update every pixel on every display-cycle.
Even with full-motion full-scree video, that's not true.
Most of the load is handled by special hardware on the video-board;
specially designed to do just such things.
When nothing or very little changes on the screen, there's essentially
NO load on the processor at all!
Your desktop can be two-billion by two-billion pixels; and as long as
the display and video-card are rated to that resolution, it puts *NO*
load on the processor at all during most things that happen. Filling
out screens of data with text or the graphics available on websites
takes about nothing of the processors capabilities.
About the only thing that DOES heavily use both a processor and
video-card at higher resolutions, are video-games.
THERE, (in games) you pretty much have to TRY your board/card
combination and find out how much resolution you can set the card to and
still have reasonably decent response-time or without the movements
getting jerky. The higher the resolution you can pick, the better the
game generally looks.
That's WHY ultimate gamers pick both high-end or even multiple
processors, and video boards with multi-megapixel throughput, along with
heavy on-board processor power to do the fancy shading and stuff so the
main motherboard processor doesn't have to.
THERE, it's usually far more the video-board abilities that determine
whether a game runs smoothly at high resolution than anything else.
That, of course, makes the high price of such boards worth it to those
people who spend large portions of their time playing such games.
But for the *desktop*, it don't take shit essentially from the processor
at the highest resolution you can set the board/display combination.
What makes the difference *there* is clarity.
Now, the hardware guys in this NG know that newer video cards/MBs have some
special features that speed things up. That's why thay say, "it depends".
It more than "just depends"; in *gaming* that makes all the difference
in the world, which board and processor and memory you have.
For the desktop though, high and low resolution run at about the same
speed. Low resolution looks crappy though; and High resolution can make
some things too small to see easily. So, you sometimes have to change
font-sizes and icon sizes if you go high-resolution on the desktop. But
doing-so DOES make a big difference in how easy things are on the eye.
Geesh.
