Lower resolution gaming on 1080p screen

[neonyziee]

Hello,

I'm planning on buying a laptop soon, for college. I may use it for some games like CS:GO, FIFA or GTA, so it doesn't have to be anything special. However I a need good CPU, so I'm going with the i7-4720HQ. For the money I have, I can afford a notebook with GTX 950M GDDR3 (maybe I could find one with GDDR5, not sure), but what seems to be the problem is that every notebook has 1080p resolution on 15.6" screen. That may cause problem for games, I want to lower down the resolution to get better FPS while gaming.

So I need answer from someone who knows, or has tested gaming in the same circumstances.

Will games look terrible and jagged when played at lower resolution (eg. 1366x768) on a 1920x1080 15.6" screen?

Thanks for your answers. Cheers.

 

[yatys93]

shouldn't do, I gamed a 32 inch 720 screen for a few years and didn't see much of an issue, you might just have those little black boarders on some res's is all

 

[neonyziee]

shouldn't do, I gamed a 32 inch 720 screen for a few years and didn't see much of an issue, you might just have those little black boarders on some res's is all

Was 720p your screens' native resolution? I'm curious because screen is 1080p, and games would be played at almost the half of that resolution, however screen is only 15.6", so it maybe wouldn't be an issue. Thanks for your reply.

 

[yatys93]

shouldn't do, I gamed a 32 inch 720 screen for a few years and didn't see much of an issue, you might just have those little black boarders on some res's is all

Was 720p your screens' native resolution? I'm curious because screen is 1080p, and games would be played at almost the half of that resolution, however screen is only 15.6", so it maybe wouldn't be an issue. Thanks for your reply.

it was, I ran out of money buying the thing 😛 bare in mind though the if you drop the resolution, you can turn up AA to smooth out any edges to do see, but I doubt the you will notice on a screen that size, you can always use a cable to output to a 1080p monitor too while you aren't travelling.

 

[Shadowbi]

They certainly do not look as good as they do when running at 1080p. The problem isn't really the increased jaggedness, but the reduction in detail (blurriness) and the deformation caused by the image scaling. This last one occurs because, to map a 1366x768 to a 1920x1080 screen, some "internal" pixels would have to map to 2 physical pixels while others map to only 1. Only resolutions that are a full fraction of the bigger screen don't have this problem, such as 960x540 on a 1920x1080 screen. Otherwise, the deformation is very noticeable, especially on text, which looks really bad. You can try it at your desktop or whatever other 1080p screen you have, and notice the deformations. On some games with little or no text or small details it still looks ok, but otherwise it is bad enough that I would take the performance hit from making it run at full resolution.
With that being said, a GTX950M is still pretty good. I had an Inspiron 7720 with a GT 650M, and it could play Dark Souls 2, Batman: Arkham City and Witcher 2 on full resolution without any problems. Never played a game it couldn't play.

 

[neonyziee]

They certainly do not look as good as they do when running at 1080p. The problem isn't really the increased jaggedness, but the reduction in detail (blurriness) and the deformation caused by the image scaling. This last one occurs because, to map a 1366x768 to a 1920x1080 screen, some "internal" pixels would have to map to 2 physical pixels while others map to only 1. Only resolutions that are a full fraction of the bigger screen don't have this problem, such as 960x540 on a 1920x1080 screen. Otherwise, the deformation is very noticeable, especially on text, which looks really bad. You can try it at your desktop or whatever other 1080p screen you have, and notice the deformations. On some games with little or no text or small details it still looks ok, but otherwise it is bad enough that I would take the performance hit from making it run at full resolution.
With that being said, a GTX950M is still pretty good. I had an Inspiron 7720 with a GT 650M, and it could play Dark Souls 2, Batman: Arkham City and Witcher 2 on full resolution without any problems. Never played a game it couldn't play.

Sou you're saying that GTX950M (with DDR3 memory) should be just fine running games on 1080p low settings?

 

[Shadowbi]

They certainly do not look as good as they do when running at 1080p. The problem isn't really the increased jaggedness, but the reduction in detail (blurriness) and the deformation caused by the image scaling. This last one occurs because, to map a 1366x768 to a 1920x1080 screen, some "internal" pixels would have to map to 2 physical pixels while others map to only 1. Only resolutions that are a full fraction of the bigger screen don't have this problem, such as 960x540 on a 1920x1080 screen. Otherwise, the deformation is very noticeable, especially on text, which looks really bad. You can try it at your desktop or whatever other 1080p screen you have, and notice the deformations. On some games with little or no text or small details it still looks ok, but otherwise it is bad enough that I would take the performance hit from making it run at full resolution.
With that being said, a GTX950M is still pretty good. I had an Inspiron 7720 with a GT 650M, and it could play Dark Souls 2, Batman: Arkham City and Witcher 2 on full resolution without any problems. Never played a game it couldn't play.

Sou you're saying that GTX950M (with DDR3 memory) should be just fine running games on 1080p low settings?

It depends on the game, I never played a 2015 game on it, but most likely yes.