Does lowering the resolution improve game performance?

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xibalban

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Say, you have a 1080p monitor and your game struggles at <10 fps at the lowest detail setting at 1920 × 1080 resolution. I was wondering if lowering the gaming resolution to say 800 × 600 would help improve the fps of the game. If yes, by how much? Any experience folks?

Game booster doesn't help much!
 

himmatsj

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Yes. Definitely.

Up until a few hours ago, I had a low end GT620 card. My monitor is 1080p. Save for some of the 2D games, nothing would run 60fps on 1080p. So especially for 3D games, I'd dial down to 720p. Anything lower than 720p can get real ugly on a 1080p monitor (how big is yours? mine is 23''). 800x600 won't play nice at all.

I could play stuff like Xcom, Deus Ex and Dishonored all at around 30fps when I dialed down to 1366x768. How big a difference? It should multiply the number of frame rate between 2 to 3 times I reckon.

What game are you speaking about though above? Worth noting I never played any of the latest marvels like Tomb Raider, Bioshock Infinite or Thief so I don't know how much improvement there is available to the latest gen games.
 
Lowering the resolution will improve your game performance if your GPU is where your bottleneck is. Having fewer pixels to render means you don't need as much GPU horsepower to achieve acceptable performance. However, if your CPU is your bottleneck, then lowering the resolution won't really help performance.

Having said all of that, if you are referring to the system in your signature, you shouldn't have problems running any game at 1080p resolution at a decent framerates, especially on the lowest detail settings. If you are getting that performance level on your signature machine, then you probably other issues causing the low performance eg. overheating or graphics driver conflicts.
 

xibalban

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The GPU in question doesn't exist actually, since I was experimenting with Haswell's in-built HD Graphics, i5-4430 to be specific. Games that I tried are Sleeping Dogs and Assassin's Creed IV - Black Flag. Sleeping dogs gave around 30 fps while Black Flag "blacked out" at under 6 fps. Display is a 24" 1080p LED 60 Hz.
 

Bad_Kitty13

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if you was wondering people have reviewed and benched the hd 4600 series graphics.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Intel/Core_i7_4770K_Haswell_GPU/1.html
 
Yeah, the Intel IGP isn't that great, some games won't work at all or will perform quite poorly. ACIV isn't the most well optimized title, and isn't the greatest performing game on dedicated GPUs. Other than getting the latest drivers for the IGP, there probably isn't much you can do to get that game running until you get a dedicated graphics card. You definitely don't have a CPU bottleneck in this case, so lowering the resolution will help you squeeze out more performance, the Intel IGP really can't do 1080p gaming at all, and is at best barely adequate for 720p gaming if you only play games that are older or not too graphically demanding.
 

xibalban

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Spot-on Supernova1138, and I had solicited this advice for a friend as a matter of fact. This is linked to another thread (http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/2045015/last-read) where I was inclining to ask my friend to wait a little while until the Maxwell rolls out fully, and till then to play on his 4430's integrated GPU.
 

xibalban

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Probably right, but my friend's circumstances are not the best, at the moment. He only has one shot at buying his "dream" gpu, and besides the re-sale value of electronic components is "null" around here and if, that is, you did manage to find someone who'll buy it. I'm just hoping that the wait will be worth it, for him.
 
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