Public Commander Keen Forum

I'm curious: What resolution does your monitor(s) run at? Both of mine run natively at 1080.


I'm toying around with the concept of a game engine, but I'd like to know what native resolutions people's monitors can handle. Although 21:9 appears to be popular for HD movies, the 16:9 is the most popular aspect ratio for PC monitors and HD TVs, at least by browsing NewEgg; however, I'm not sure if everyone's monitors handles 1080, 900, or 720 HD resolutions. I don't think that many people run 4:3 aspect ratio monitors anymore, but that would be good to know, too. So please let me know if you use a different aspect ratio.



DEV NOTES:

Oct 11, 2015 Update:

I haven't "officially" announced this project yet, and I won't for some time because this is in the extreme alpha-phase and 100% in my limited free-time, but I'd like to give little mini-updates. So from now until I give an official announcement of what I'm doing, I'll keep vague updates here. This is mostly a way of just having a record of what's (again vaguely) going on in this project of mine.

I'm moving my engine out of GameMaker:Studio (which has been collecting a lot of problems for me, and presents several unacceptable limitations as well as several coding irritations). I'm looking into a library for C++ called SDL, and placing my engine on top of that. It has all of the usual programming features that I know how to program in, and it will remove the bloat of GM:S. It seems like exactly what I want --SDL acts as an intermediary for hardware, and I just get inputs/give outputs from/to the hardware, including threads for parallel programming, which looks like it'll be necessary (I'll explain this if/when I ever officially announce what I'm doing). This isn't a big change, because I was basically writing my own graphics engine on top of GM:S and I was using only the hardware input/output functions (taking in key inputs, drawing to the screen, etc), and I was going to need to use a DLL to handle sound files eventually, anyways. So there really was no reason whatsoever to use GM:S, other than familiarity.

October 19th, 2015 Update:

As stated, I'll update occasionally on here. So I'm thinking the engine will run better with hardware acceleration, which wasn't obviously true at first. I have been going through a tutorial on SDL2 and a few tutorials refreshing myself of the details of C++, and soon I'll be starting a tutorial on OpenGL 3.2 when used with SDL2. I have no idea if I'll finish this project, but so far it's been fun coding again --modding the tutorial code to display my graphics, get rough estimates of image rendering times, playing sounds, taking in keyboard inputs, etc, which has been cool. I haven't done this kind of stuff for a decade, and in one week I've gotten much farther than I had in six months when I tried this in high school (And I mean way, way farther). So we'll see where it goes.

For anyone who's interested, Lazy Foo' has some excellent SDL2 introduction specifically for games, and I'm going to start open.gl's intro to OpenGL 3.2 tutorial within a day or two, and cprogramming.com is the place I always go when I start writing C++ code, to remind myself of the syntax. Honestly, I like coding in C++, I think it's a really efficient and really nice language. People seem to be moving away from it, but I'm not really sure why.

I currently use 1024x768...primitive, I know haha

1366x768

For the laptop anyway...

1080p but I still believe that majority of the resolutions around the world are 1366x768 (unfortunately) due to the fact that most of the laptops from low to the middle class still use that.

No love for 1680x1050?

Laptop resolution at 1920 x 1080.
I bought the laptop for the sole purpose of playing the Ur-Quan Masters HD remake, and haven't gotten around to it yet.

*rolls 4 dice*

1440 x 900

*flicks a three-sided coin*

1920x1080. At first I didn't think it'd be a huge deal (certianly, 720p vs 1080p has never bothered me on consoles), but now I honestly don't know how I lived without it. The extra space is just too useful.

I used to use ridiculously high resolution on my pc. I can't remember the exact dimensions. I think it destroyed my eyesight

Now I think I would require glasses even for 320x200

One of these days, though, im gonna spend some of my hard earned cash on a 25 inch monitor!

Keening_Product wrote:No love for 1680x1050?

16:10 isn't a very popular monitor resolution, but I'm going to guess that you have a Mac that's about ~3-4 years old? Alternatively, you have a PC with one of those odd Dell 16:10 monitors. I know that Mac's use the 16:10 aspect ratio for the graphical artist/more high end computers, and I believe they used the 1050p for a while before they finally converted to 1200p like the rest of the world has come to love. =P

I know some hardcore gamer's with money to burn will also use the 1200p 16:10 aspect ratio monitors.

Okay, so it looks like it'd be best if I optimized the engine for both 1080p w/ 16:9 and 1366x768 (which is ~16:9). But realistically, I probably will only optimize for 1080p.

So if I upscaled the image by a factor of 2, that would mean that laptops would prefer a screen size around 960x540 neglecting borders, but the laptop would prefer (assuming an upscaling) a size of 683x384 again neglecting borders.

Ugh. I will probably make the engine assuming 1080p (well, half of 1080p, and minus borders) and force the GPU to scale it for non-1080p resolutions. That's inefficient for laptops, and the engine I'm building will be CPU-intensive rather than GPU-intensive (Unless I figure out how to write my own shaders, which there's a 99.99% probability that won't happen), which is less than desirable because laptops don't have as powerful of CPU's as desktops. The flipside is that there's only so CPU-intensive that a 2-D/2.5D engine can be, so I'm probably worrying over nothing. I did a mock-up of the kinds of calculations that my engine will need to perform, and it used up maybe 5% of my CPU (although it is an i5 Ivy Bridge, which is significantly better than what's in most laptops, so probably like 20% CPU processing, but even that's not that much). Anyways, I'm going to end this stream of conciousness, and thank you guys for the input.



EDIT: So my monitor can display that odd 768 resolution, so I can at least check out how my engine would look like at that resolution.

GoldenRishi wrote:I'm going to guess that you have a Mac

It's a second hand Benq monitor a friend gave to me. They use macs, but I think they got this before they switched to them. I think they now have a Macbook and an Air - no desktops.

Any idea why Apple broke convention? Or was it just because Apple likes to be inconveniently different?

My computer's resolution is 1600x900.

I also have 16:10, 1920x1200 to be more precise.

Keening_Product wrote:

GoldenRishi wrote:I'm going to guess that you have a Mac

It's a second hand Benq monitor a friend gave to me. They use macs, but I think they got this before they switched to them. I think they now have a Macbook and an Air - no desktops.

Any idea why Apple broke convention? Or was it just because Apple likes to be inconveniently different?

Prior to them switching over to 1920x1200 for their high end desktops? I'm not sure.

Or their use of 16:10 over 16:9? I think the argument is that it's more screen space for graphic artists, so it's viewed as a generally positive thing. Personally, I prefer wider screen space, it's why I have a dual monitor configuration.

Looking at their website, they're now pimping out a 5K monitor.