Resolution

Living in a place with daily temperatures rivaling hades, I burn up my computer every few years. Though, this is the first time I've had to go through the process of transferring all those great and sometimes huge mods I've downloaded over my time here. Not to mention all my own work, having never deleted a file - and I've got tons of unpublished trash.

Now, though, the chore is over and I went back to start on an ongoing project. I'm using the same monitor as before - 24" widescreen. Was using XP, but now on Win7. Things looked really different, so I started playing around with the resolution. I'm still not sure if I'm satisfied.

All my previous work and game playing was done at (Gasp!) 1024x768. It just seemed good then . Looking at it now on this computer seems ridiculous. At the very moment I'm looking at 1280x960, but I've been playing around with resolutions near there.

All that^ just to ask around what resolution others are using for their graphic work and game playing...

?

1680x1050

1280x1024. Best resolution ever.

The only game I play in a different solution is Civ3, for which I use 1024x768. I don't know why, but it feels more fitting.

and I've got tons of unpublished trash.

Click to expand...

Me too!

1920 x 1200 Wide Screen but set the game to use the 1024 x 768 Normal Square Screen.

1920x1080 (not windowed) - the game scales the screen to fit that resolution perfectly.

Thank you all for the input.

I tried every suggestion. I liked the largeness of 1280X1024 but there was still some distortion for me. My monitor, for whatever reason, won't go all the way to 1920X1200. It maxes out at 1920X1080. (Maybe the monitor is 23.6 and not 24".) In the end, the winner for me is 1680X1050. It is definitely a bit sharper than what I started the topic with. Thanks Ares and all. I let windows supplement it with the text enlargement option giving, in my opinion, 1680 graphics with 1280 text.

I also tried playing around with the Keepres and videomode options in the .ini file, and honestly I never saw much difference. Maybe I'll try these again sometime later.


*I thought of the technical forum after the fact. If this thread needs to be moved, feel free.

I use 1920x1200 for everything, including Civ3, on my desktop with a 24" screen. As for 1920x1080, it started becoming more common around 2008 - 2010, replacing 1920x1200. I suspect it's a combination of being slightly less expensive for the same nominal screen size, and aligning with the TV industry's advertising of 1080p. These days, you can find laptops with 1920x1080, but none (or nearly none) with 1920x1200, except the used market. With desktop monitors, there are more 1920x1080 than 1920x1200, and the former is generally less expensive, but there are still a fair amount of 1920x1200 monitors, particularly on the higher end. I prefer it because I find that for reading and programming, vertical pixels are quite useful. For gaming, it matters less.

Even on my laptop, I keep Civ at the laptop's native resolution of 1280x800. I like the crispness of native resolution, and have become used to being able to see more of the map at once than back when I played at 1024x768 on a CRT.

For civ3 I use 1280x768, it's the resolution the game was made for and I like the size of the units, cities, etc... at that resolution. Plus I didn't want to make new title screens, city screens and the like. I get the whole monitor filled with the game, it's nice.

I use 1600 x 900. Found that (imho) monitor's native rez (1920 x 1080) made units, etc. too small and that the C3 standard made them so big that pixel edges sometimes showed. The compromise (imho) is sufficiently smooth, while allowing for an expansive swathe of visible map.

Again, thanks for the replies, and for the additional information provided by Quintillus. I've taken a look at the resolutions mentioned and fiddled with a few more. Sometimes there's an amazing difference between similar resolutions. I went back to the 1680x1050. It just has a nice sharpness the others don't. Well, 1900 is super sharp but 1. It seems like I lose things like menu bars, and half the buttons are gone and 2. Things are just too small for my bad eyes.

With the .ini file, I did get keep res to work successfully today, but I'm still not sold on Video mode. I'd like to try to get it to definitively produce 1280 graphics, but I'm not sure I got it to work. I'll keep playing around with it.

I'm pretty settled on the 1680X1050 for my normal computer/monitor usage, the graphic work. But I had to play around a little more in the game to be sure. Not getting the results from Video Mode in the .ini file, I just used the KeepRes and changed my monitor's resolution to various settings.

Playing at 1280X960 is the clear winner so far. Good call, Alekseyev. I think the 960 stretches things a little less than the 1024. I tried 1280X768 and only got 3/4 screen filled. So, that wasn't going to work for me. It was clean though, about the same as 960, as close as I could tell.

Vuldacon, fill that screen out, buddy. I do like prefer the extra real estate, though.