Polling and Graphics: Help Us Help You
by Derek Wilson on January 27, 2009 11:05 PM EST- Posted in
- Dell
Hello everyone. We often get asked questions like: what is the most popular x? how common is y? And sometimes we can guess from what we read on the forums or from general market trends. But nothing beats actually knowing what readers are thinking. So it's about time we asked.
We've brought back the ability to do polls. And polls we shall do.
This is more or less a test run to see how polling works out, but I'm hoping we can answer one really key question and also satisfy a curiosity today. The really important question has to do with display information, while the curiosity has to do with current opinions about graphics hardware.
By knowing what resolutions our reader's displays are capable of, we can help target our testing and articles to better accommodate the average reader. We can look more heavily at graphics solutions that satisfy the needs of more of our readers. We've been doing a lot of high end stuff lately (and we've got one more in the pipe), but we are ready to focus on the more mainstream and value segments and we would love to be able to taylor those articles a bit better.
Also, there are a lot of different monitor options with all the many widescreen and laptop panels. Just pick the one that's closest to yours out of this list. If you really want to be as accurate as possible, you could multiply out the resolutions and see which has the closest number of pixels. But just a close guess is fine too.
Well, there's really no sense in beating around the bush. It's a poll, it's not rocket science. Here it is:
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Jodiuh - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 - link
Since moving from the 4850 to the 285, I've seen less texture line crawling in Left 4 Dead, better AA @ distance in GRID, and overall improvements in AS and AA in COD4. Also, the card doesn't heat the shit out of my case.Megaknight - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 - link
That's weird, I play L4D on my 2900XT with everything maxed and the shadows don't have a single problem...Hrel - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 - link
Nice list of resolutions, you only left out every single resolution I use. 1440x900, 1360x768, 1280x800. 1280x800 is probably the most common; so I'd answer that. Why would I want things so tiny I can't even read them? Not to mention the web isn't designed for 1920x1080 let alone 1600x1200. It's just stupid to run things at that high of a resolution. 1920x1080 for high def movies, and maybe some games; but desktop res shouldn't ever be that high. I will never understand how anyone could LIKE it that high. And I've never met anyone who does.9nails - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 - link
I see where your coming from, but these high resolutions are typically on larger monitors. For example, my 22" (which has about the same area of two 17" monitors @ 1680x1050) looks fine at 96 DPI. I typically run a web browser in the normal Windowed mode, not full screen. And that leaves me plenty of room to run other tasks in the background and able to view them at the same time. (Such as Windows Media Center to watching TV - I prefer to mute and ignore commercial breaks and catch up on posts like yours!) This is like having two 17"'s side by side, so the font's are better than what you might first think.I have used some ultra high-res netbooks, that had a 1366x768 native resolution in a 8.9" screen. In that case the display fonts looked like microfiche at the normal 96 DPI fonts. Increasing the fonts to 120% helped, but caused some problems.
So, in some respect I completely agree with you in the notion that some settings can be useless, but it should be taken into context with the display panel's size.
Zak - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 - link
Um... 1920x1200 on 24" looks just fine to me and web isn't the only thing people do on their computers, or so I thought:) Everyone I know who has a 24" monitor runs it at 1920x1200 and loves it. I really can't quite grasp your comment, unless you have really bad eyesight, then I can understand.Z.
UNHchabo - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 - link
If you have a 1920x1200 monitor, run it at that resolution, then turn up the dpi setting, and increase text size if you want things to be bigger on the monitor.But you should NEVER run an LCD at anything but native res. The only exception is 3D games if your video card can't handle your res. I have an older system, so most newer games have to run at 1024x768, despite my monitor being 1440x900.
strikeback03 - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 - link
Text is plenty big at 1920x1200 on a 24" monitor. I'm looking for a 1920x1200 15.4 inch display for my next laptop.The0ne - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 - link
You're kidding yourself with 1920x1200 on 15" display. It's already tiny on my 17" and my eyesight isn't that poor. I just don't want to hunch over the screen just so be able to view text.UNHchabo - Thursday, January 29, 2009 - link
You know how in the car world they say "There's no replacement for displacement"? Well I don't have a cute saying, but a higher resolution is always better. :)If you have trouble reading text, then turn up the text size, or the dpi setting on your monitor, but always go for as many pixels as you can. :)
Zak - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 - link
My next build, in a month or so, will be dual GTX280 or GTX285 since you can't get the new Nvidia driver SLI/dual displays switching feature to work with a single SLI card, apparently, you need each monitor to be connected to a separate card to avoid painful switching between games (1 monitor, SLI) and everything else (2 monitors, no SLI). Two GTX280s would be around $650 versus $500 for GTX295, but you also get 1GB or memory which may help with 1920x1200 resolution. I had a 9800GX2 so I considered getting another one for SLI (cheap way out) but the 9800GX2 had problems at higher resolution and AA due to 512MB of RAM per GPU.Anyway, my 2 cents...
Z.