What resolution would you play PA at?

Ok. I imagine the limiting factor will be your monitor, so you can just put your maximum monitor resolution on the poll.

missing the option "depends"

(hardware requirements, current hardware, ui size, mood, ...)
after running it I can tell more.

Well, let's just say that 1920x1080 is mainstream and for noobs, while 1920x1200 is oldschool and for Pros . Almost an Hipster Resolution even! And I reckon PA's demographic consists of more 'Pros' than 'Nubs' :lol:

This! :mrgreen:

i had to put greater than listed because i would use both screens @ 1920x1200 each for 3840x1200

Okay thanks. I've never tried that and I'm not sure what that would do to UI and icon scaling? Would the UI be shown on both screens?

1920 x 1200 is a Good Resolution. I love my monitor.

How is a resolution thats bigger than 1920x1080 oldschool?
1280x1024 is oldschool. I've been using that resolution since I got my first computer xD

Tbh I have never even seen a 1920x1200 screen xD

According to that logic I am playing Supreme Commander in 2560x1024 and I will play PA in er... well it doesnt fit that fell, it will be 2x1280x1024 + 1920x1080

Size has nothing to do with it, or at least not in the reference frame we are using here. Compared to 1920x1080, 1920x1200 is oldschool. Back in the "olden days" 16:9 for desktop monitor was pretty rare. When widescreen desktop monitors gained popularity and affordability, they were all 16:10. And 1920x1200 were top of the line, expensive products, which only the real nerds afforded themselves .

But in recent years, 16:9 desktop monitors got more and more common. Or rather, laptops got more and more common and on them 16:9 screens got more and more common, and soon also 16:9 desktop screens got common as well. With their slightly smaller size, they were cheaper to produce, but retained the same 'usable space' for widescreen movies as their 16:10 counterparts (with equal dpi). Pretty much any 16:9 desktop monitor is "newschool".

Although 1920x1200 is still not that unpopular of a choice. I am currently planning on upgrading my 1680x1050 Eizo FlexScan S2231W to a Dell U2412M (1920x1200), since my second screen (really old and ugly 4:3 one with 1280x1024) died and I don't really want to buy another one of those things new.

It's definitly oldschool, but also unremarkable ;P

Depends on how you set up your screens. There are two options. You can span them via your graphics driver, which makes any application think you are just having one display device with a much bigger resolution. The UI would simply align itself in such a ways as it was simply one big screen (as it is made to believe that).

Or you do not span, but extend your desktop and the application supports multiple monitors, like Supreme Commander and Planetary Annihilation. I reckon you know how that works in Supreme Commander.


Either way, how scaling is handled is a different story (e.g., not at all, as it usually is ).

I was vaguely aware you could have 2 monitors treated as one big screen but I'm still clueless as to how that would affect scaling on something like SupCom.

Actually I can imagine it being pretty unplayable :!:

With the number of massively different resolutions posted I can see why scaling is difficult (unless stuff is drawn as vectors where it can be? Is that even possible in a game like this? :O I have basically zero knowledge on this topic so probably a stupid question).

I would think that 2 separate views would be more strategically useful in this game than one massive view, but until we play it I guess we won't know for sure.

generally i am assuming some usage similar to supcom in the multimonitor situation where i have 2 viewports. so the UI don't care
it is only on the primary, or perhaps in PA it is on both duplicated

Ah I see. Well in that case your resolution would be effectively the resolution of just one of your monitors, for UI purposes, as I understand it So I think 1920x1200 would be the correct poll choice.

What do you mean by scaling here excactly? The scaling of the UI in terms of size? The UI will never be rendered in a different size in TA/SupCom/FA. If an UI element is 100x50 pixels, then it will still be 100x50 pixels no matter what resolution you are using. Nothing will be "unplayable" by that.

The only thing that can cause it to be "unplayable" is the degrading rendering performance with higher resolutions.


Btw. Supreme Commander 2 "supports" Eyefinity. This "support" manifests itself in the game automatically re-positioning the User Interface, so that it stays on the center screen, rather than being all the way to the left and all the way to the right for instance (example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYu7dIJC-gY ).

For comparison, here you have the same example, but with Forged Alliance, where you can see that the UI does not take this into account: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2BCvnVMlsw . Here you can also see a direct screen recording of such a setup: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYEhuzRzWJU .

You don't want the game to scale the UI up or down in such a case. The position and proportions are what's off then, not the size in general.

In fact the whole game-image basically is generated like a vector-image. You have some kind of 3D-World that you project onto your screen. Doesnt matter how many Pixels your screen have, if you have more thats just more work for the computer to determine what this pixels need to show. You can render your world in any resolution you want. If you feel like a bit of math, read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasterisation
The only problem with different resolutions is that the 2D-Userinterface that is drawn on top of the 3D-Image needs to properly adapt. That requires a bit of thinking.

Well, I suppose the important metric is pixel density. I'm not sure people would answer a poll on that though.

Either way UI elements look tiny on my screen (25" 1900x1200) in TA and SupCom games at native resolution. So do units for that matter.

1920x1080 is not standard. Thats still considered high-end. I would have thought 1680x1050 was standard (thats what I use, and all my monitor supports), but random internet googling has given me this:



Ironic that the resolution of the image is a bit low to see the difference in the colors, but the dominant screen resolution is only recently 1366x768, and before that it was 1024x768. Which suggests that many people are still using CRT monitors; probably only replacing them when they finally die.

Gamers who invest in desktop gaming PC's are ahead of the curve, but I couldn't find any stats on that.

I went straight to the source website and reran the information for the current date. Didn't change much, but made numbers more visible.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#resolution-ww-monthly-201108-201208

Seems like people interested in PA have more capable hardware than the general internet public, which makes sense. Those data that you linked will include work computers.

True, but I also see a lot of people wanting to run games on suboptimal laptops too. Optimus, for example, is terrible for gaming, but theres demand to make it workable and Neutrino even hinted that they'll support it.

Besides, its raw data. Its inherently more accurate than "I think X is true".

I suppose you mean 24" with 1920x1200. A 25" one does not exist, only 2 old 25.5 ones, that aren't sold anymore, and those would have a lower pixel density even.

Those 24" 1920x1200 screens have a pixel density of 90 dpi. 22" screens with 1680x1050 (another common size) also have a pixel density of 90 dpi. 17" screens with 1280x1024 (common size a long time ago ) have 95 dpi. Point being: it's not actually smaller on your big screen. It may just feels that way, because the UI looks smaller relative to the available space in pixel while the actual real life size of an UI element is roughly the same. And you might have more distance between you and the screen, than you would have between a 17" screen for instance. 24" screens with a resolution 1920x1200 do not have a pixel density above the norm.

All those 2560x1440 and 2560x1600 screens on the other hand, this is where things get truly "small" . They have a pixel density of 100 dpi or higher. And then there are developments like the 4K TVs or Apple's "Retina" displays.

While definitely true for TA, it's not the case for Supreme Commander, obviously. The size of the units simply depend on your zoom level...

The already mentioned Steam's hardware survey surely is a better measure of what a gamer typically has, rather than the stats from StatCount, which simply counts anything. And that survey shows, that 1920x1080 is indeed the most popular one, by far.