Just to settle an argument will running a high screen resolution (eg 1280X1024) slow a machine down. I wouldn't have thought it would make much difference to performance as the graphics card would handle most of the over head
Hmm well more resoloution = more data needing to be written to the screen (which is actually a memory location) So I would think that there is 'some' overhead involved in that but I seriously doubt it would make any noticable slowness.
If you're playing games then the higher the resolution and colour depth you're running, the more detail (and therefore volume of data) the card has to throw around and so the harder it has to work and the slower it'll be. In a Windows environment though, it's as negligible as makes no odds.
Won't make the computer itself slow but will make the graphics card a bit hungry for more computing time. mind you this is only when running high res games like, Battlefield or farcry. Mine runs at 1280x1024 constantly, lcd tft screen. I have not seen any change in performance in my pc, although saying that i have spent about 3K on it.
If the chosen resolution is within the bandwidth capability of your system you will not see a slow down. Eg. 640x480 res at 256 colours (basic 8 bit VGA = ~2.5Mbytes data per screen 1280x1024 res at True colour (24 bit) = ~30Mbytes data per screen If your system has a throughput higher than ~30Mbytes of data per frame you will not notice a slow down. Basically to get 30fps (minimum for decent games) you're talking about 60Mbytes/sec for VGA and 900Mbytes/sec for the hi-res. In practice it's less than this as most graphics card work out only the pixels that have changed between frames and update them. It's also complicated by 3D processing etc.. Basically most modern system will be unaffected by resolution in 2D/Windows performance, but 3D stuff will soon show up the limitations. Cheers, Drew.
