LF advice on optimal monitor resolution for gaming with upgraded 2008 MP.

[Phrygian]

Its time to buy a new monitor (because my GF wants mine.....)

Anyway, I wanted to ask advice on what kind of monitor i should get and what resolution

I want a 21.5-23 inch monitor
LED vs LCD is the first question. As i understand LED has much high contrast, but can be horribly bright...

the second and more important question is pixel resolution. I currently use 1600x900 screen and i do quite a bit of gaming. I'm concerned that going up to 1900x1200 will be too much for my system.

I have a 2.8 dual quad core 2008 and i have upgraded it for a total off 14gigs of ram and it is using a AMD HD 6870 1g GPU, and i use a crucial m4 ssd.

Should i stay with the 1600 or move up to the 1900? Will a 1900 monitor do just as well as 1600 if i decide to lower the resolution? I alt-tab a lot so i would want my screen resolution to always match my screen resolution. I game both with osx and win 7.


Thanks for the input in advance.

 

[Phrygian]

No thoughts/responses at all?

Seems like a relatively easy question...


How bout this. if i get a 1900x1200 monitor, can i put it down to 1600x1050 without any problems?

 

[deconstruct60]

... it is using a AMD HD 6870 1g GPU,
....
Should i stay with the 1600 or move up to the 1900? Will a 1900 monitor do just as well as 1600 if i decide to lower the resolution?

HD 6870
"...
DisplayPort 1.2
Max resolution: 2560x1600 per display
Multi-Stream Transport
21.6 Gbps bandwidth
High bit-rate audio
HDMI® (With 3D, Deep Color and x.v.Color™)
Max resolution: 1920x1200
Dual-link DVI with HDCP
Max resolution: 2560x1600
VGA
Max resolution: 2048x1536
..."
http://www.amd.com/us/products/desk...6870/pages/amd-radeon-hd-6870-overview.aspx#2

That's per monitor. The card is capable of running a couple monitors. You want to attach a single, less than 24" screen of significantly lower resolution.

 

[Phrygian]

HD 6870
"...
DisplayPort 1.2
Max resolution: 2560x1600 per display
Multi-Stream Transport
21.6 Gbps bandwidth
High bit-rate audio
HDMI® (With 3D, Deep Color and x.v.Color™)
Max resolution: 1920x1200
Dual-link DVI with HDCP
Max resolution: 2560x1600
VGA
Max resolution: 2048x1536
..."
http://www.amd.com/us/products/desk...6870/pages/amd-radeon-hd-6870-overview.aspx#2

That's per monitor. The card is capable of running a couple monitors. You want to attach a single, less than 24" screen of significantly lower resolution.

Thats right, i do. I don't want my Frame rate to fall into the gutter. I clearly explained that it would affect graphic intensive games such as planetside 2.

 

[deconstruct60]

Thats right, i do. I don't want my Frame rate to fall into the gutter. I clearly explained that it would affect graphic intensive games such as planetside 2.

It is less than 1M additional pixels.

As noted above the card can deal with > 20Gbps rates off the DisplayPort. What kind of impact is another 1M pixels going to be?

There is 1GB of VRAM so how much cache or vertex store space going to loose with additional 500K of framebuffer?

The specs put the top float computation capacity at 2TFLOPs

So back of the envelope let's say each pixels needs 50 float ops for each of the 1M pixles ( just to keep math simple but in reasonable orders of magnitude). 50M float ops would take all of 2.5% of a second to do. It would take 10 frames to loose 25% of the max computational rate.

What is the likelihood of a cratering like impact?

There is huge difference between cratering and marginally reduced performance.

A little common sense back-of-the-envelope not good enough? .... how about a 6870 review that covers essentially the same resolutions.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3987/amds-radeon-6870-6850-renewing-competition-in-the-midrange-market