Odd discovery, wondered why..

[ShaneG_old]

I've always had both of my monitors set at 1024x768 resolution, and the same for for FS9 & FSX, mainly for the screenshot guidelines here.

Last night, while digging through a pile of manuals, I found the books for the monitors, and they suggested setting them to 1440x900, so I did, and then did the same in FS9 & FSX.

FS9 seemed to come almost to a stop while I was in the UI, but once in game, well, I never knew that FS9 could look that good, and it ran as smooth as it always has, with no trace of the lag I experienced in the UI.

So I thought, I bet this will kill my FSX, as I don't have that great a set up for it.  Fire it up, and no apparent change in the UI like there was with FS9, no UI resizing, or lag detected.  Select my usual starting flight, and all I could say was...

WOW!  It was SO smooth, and clear, and I almost wanted to cry because I was so amazed and happy that I was seeing this on my system. 



So, my question (finally) is, why?  I always thought, that a higher resolution would require more processing power and thus slow things down, not speed them up and make them smoother.   :-?

Thanks for any clarification. 

[Hagar]

I've always had both of my monitors set at 1024x768 resolution, and the same for for FS9 & FSX, mainly for the screenshot guidelines here.

Last night, while digging through a pile of manuals, I found the books for the monitors, and they suggested setting them to 1440x900, so I did, and then did the same in FS9 & FSX.

Presumably you have widescreen monitors. I know just enough about it to know that 1440 x 900 is a widescreen resolution as opposed to the 1024 x 768 resolution used on standard monitors. 1440 x 900 is the native resolution for a lot of widescreen monitors of various sizes. I assume that they work more efficiently when set to the native resolution.

PS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_resolution

[Daube]

Hagar is right, playing on a widescreen with a resolution which is not 16/9 is never a good idea.
Also, nowadays modern video cards (I'm talking about any card since GeForce 5xxx) are optimized for high resolutions. They WILL work better at 1440x900 than 1024x768.

Finally, in FSX with a widescreen monitor, you get the wide view (don't forget to set the "wideview" parameter to "true" in the FSX.cfg), which is totally awesome for the VC view !

I believe FS9 was supporting the wideview too... I'm not too sure anymore...