Preferred screen Resolution

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JayBlue
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Preferred screen Resolution

#1 Post by JayBlue »

What's your preferred screen resolution?

The game I've been working on has the screen set to 1024 x 600. Before I develop the menus and arena anymore, I want to see if anyone has any preferences for screen size.
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Re: Preferred screen Resolution

#2 Post by papillon »

A lot of people will object strongly to games that small these days.

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Re: Preferred screen Resolution

#3 Post by SundownKid »

According to Steam about 40% of PC gamers have 1080p screens. 25% have 1366x768.

Ergo 1080p makes the most sense as a default resolution. Your res is very small, unless you are working on a retro type game.

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Re: Preferred screen Resolution

#4 Post by Fuseblower »

It depends on your art work as SundownKid said. For a pixel art game, 1024x600 would be way too high. Go with something like 320x200 for that (notice the retro aspect ratio too, 4:3 vs 16:9) and with a low color count (16 or 32). But if your art relies on very fine line work then the higher is the better. Also : VN are typically composed of stills. A still requires a higher resolution than animation (notice how low the resolution of youtube clips are, they're typically in the resolution of old VCRs).

That being said : I don't mind low resolutions. In the 80s computers went with resolutions like 256x192 and 16 colors. I still love to play those games. For me, as far as what makes a game good or not, the resolution is waaaay down the list.

Also : higher resolution means that more memory is used. Some gaming sites put a maximum to the size of the game (like 50MB, for example).

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Re: Preferred screen Resolution

#5 Post by JayBlue »

SundownKid wrote:According to Steam about 40% of PC gamers have 1080p screens. 25% have 1366x768.

Ergo 1080p makes the most sense as a default resolution. Your res is very small, unless you are working on a retro type game.
If 1080p is the most common then I'll probably go with that.
Fuseblower wrote:It depends on your art work as SundownKid said. For a pixel art game, 1024x600 would be way too high. Go with something like 320x200 for that (notice the retro aspect ratio too, 4:3 vs 16:9) and with a low color count (16 or 32). But if your art relies on very fine line work then the higher is the better. Also : VN are typically composed of stills. A still requires a higher resolution than animation (notice how low the resolution of youtube clips are, they're typically in the resolution of old VCRs).
well my art does have fine line work so high res is probably better.

I might need a crash course in aspect ratio since I've never been able to completely understand it.
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Re: Preferred screen Resolution

#6 Post by Tyrantauranox »

My tower, main laptop, and spare tower are all 1080p (1920 x 1080). I also have a tiny laptop that runs at 1366 x 768, but I never game with that

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Re: Preferred screen Resolution

#7 Post by Selidor »

I have a 2570x1440 monitor, and honestly a lot of VNs don't look great running full screen because they don't support the resolution. So my preference is as large as possible, but more realistically, as long as the game supports windowed mode I don't mind.

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Re: Preferred screen Resolution

#8 Post by 8oni »

I will be different and say 800x600 is good enough for me.

Reason : I use a slow comp so if I want to play any game that take too much memory I will have to close everything else and only open that game and that's no for me. I need and want to do something else too so well, I guess it depends on the comp spec. If I have good one I wouldn't mind a big resolution game with a lot visual effect.

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Re: Preferred screen Resolution

#9 Post by Sonomi »

I'm also curious about this. My laptop is quite modest, so I'm drawing at a 1280x720 resolution. Sometimes I wonder if I should go higher, though.
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Re: Preferred screen Resolution

#10 Post by JayBlue »

I see... So this is why AAA games have multiple res sizes.
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Re: Preferred screen Resolution

#11 Post by Aviala »

There have been multiple threads about this in the past, and the consensus/final answer has pretty much always been to use full HD (1920x1080p) resolution, since it's the most common, and while it's always possible to fit a bigger resolution game in a smaller screen, stretching a small resolution game into a big screen looks bad. Most gamers aren't using screens that are smaller than full HD anymore, unless they're gaming on the go on their laptop. But even then, full HD is probably the way to go.

As for my personal opinion, I'd be really annoyed if a modern game wasn't able to fill my HD screen.

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Re: Preferred screen Resolution

#12 Post by LateWhiteRabbit »

JayBlue wrote:I see... So this is why AAA games have multiple res sizes.
Haha. Yes.

If you can pick only one resolution you pretty much want to go full HD - 1080p, which is 1920x1080 pixels. As Sundownkid mentioned, Steam surveys (which have a sample size of millions of PC gamers) show that resolution is the most common by a large margin.

You can always shrink a higher resolution down and still get good image quality - the same can't be said for the reverse. I personally create my game artwork at 3840x2160 (4K Ultra HD resolution), and reduce it to 1080p. This future-proofs my artwork.

It annoys me to no end when a game that was just released won't fill up my 1080p display. Because 1080p has been the most common PC resolution for YEARS now. And I can't stand how fuzzy things look when a lower resolution is stretched to full screen. It's especially noticeable on text, which Visual Novels have a lot of. I like crisp, sharp graphics.

Also, if you need a crash course on what aspect ratio is this video is very helpful. It is talking about film, but the principle is the exact same for games.

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Re: Preferred screen Resolution

#13 Post by PyTom »

For what it's worth, a quarter of hits to LSF are 1366x768. 1920x1080 is only 17.25%. While I think the data is ratty, I'd say 1366x768 is a resolution one should consider, even if it's just testing to see what the game looks like scaled down.
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Re: Preferred screen Resolution

#14 Post by JayBlue »

Aviala wrote:There have been multiple threads about this in the past, and the consensus/final answer has pretty much always been to use full HD (1920x1080p) resolution, since it's the most common, and while it's always possible to fit a bigger resolution game in a smaller screen, stretching a small resolution game into a big screen looks bad. Most gamers aren't using screens that are smaller than full HD anymore, unless they're gaming on the go on their laptop. But even then, full HD is probably the way to go.
I agree, but I might be at a disadvantage since I only have a laptop.
LateWhiteRabbit wrote:It annoys me to no end when a game that was just released won't fill up my 1080p display. Because 1080p has been the most common PC resolution for YEARS now. And I can't stand how fuzzy things look when a lower resolution is stretched to full screen. It's especially noticeable on text, which Visual Novels have a lot of. I like crisp, sharp graphics.

Also, if you need a crash course on what aspect ratio is this video is very helpful. It is talking about film, but the principle is the exact same for games.
Thanks for the video link. I think I'm making better sense of this now.
PyTom wrote:For what it's worth, a quarter of hits to LSF are 1366x768. 1920x1080 is only 17.25%. While I think the data is ratty, I'd say 1366x768 is a resolution one should consider, even if it's just testing to see what the game looks like scaled down.
My laptop is set to 1366x768 so I can test it with that size.


I see, so the common verdict is to go with 1920x1080 so it can fit HD screens and people can shrink the size down to fit all other sizes.
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Re: Preferred screen Resolution

#15 Post by Imperf3kt »

JayBlue wrote:I see... So this is why AAA games have multiple res sizes.
In the gaming and even animation industry, more often than not, AAA games that claim "1080p" are nothing more than 720p60 upscales or 1080i60 fields interpolated to produce a 1080p30 frame. I am of course, referring to video games and not Visual Novels.

I'd stick with 1280x720 personally. 1366*768 is becoming a more common gaming resolution though, and if you look at the latest monitor technology, you'll see either 1366x768p60 screens, or 1920x1080p60 screens and that's about it. On the higher end, you might see a few 2048x1536 screens or some that claim 120Hz, but they're mostly 6-bit displays.
1280x720 monitors are still available, but becoming far less common.

As to text "fuzzing" when fullscreen at a resolution lower than your monitor, you shouldn't see that. Renpy doesn't scale the font, it scales the font size. Text will still be crisp and readable, and your images will be stretched 2.25x, but generally you won't notice this as bad as everyone makes out.
You could always use a higher resolution image scaled down, for the images where you animate it and zooming in makes it uglier. In fact, I'd recommend that anyway, use a higher resolution canvas/texture on anything you animate.
JayBlue wrote: I see, so the common verdict is to go with 1920x1080 so it can fit HD screens and people can shrink the size down to fit all other sizes.
Scaling images down is actually more detrimental to image quality than scaling it up.
If you have an image with a 3 pixels wide line drawn on it and you scale it from 1080p to 720p, you'll end up with a 1.33 pixels wide line. What happened to the other 1.7666^ pixels? You lose them, they're gone forever.
But if you scale that image up, you end up with a 6.75 pixel wide line.
taking into account the percentage of change, you have 1.875 pixels per edge that will be blurred. But as long as you properly aliased the image before it was scaled up, there should be no real issue.

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