Resolution question

[JDog]

Seems I heard not too long ago someone said that we should be running game resolution at monitor resolution. Example being my monitor is 1600x 1080 or something very close to this, can't remember exactly. Yet I run AH at 1200x960 or something like that.

Should I be running the game at what the monitor is made for? I did make a change last night and found there to be much more texture and colors than I was seeing before, but I felt it looked worse. It did seem however that I was had a wider field of view, would this be correct?

It is a 4 gig system running vista    and the card is a Ge force 8500, frame rates are typically around 70 at lower resolution and were 56 last night at higher setting.

I'll take any tips or advice y'all have to offer.

JDog  <S>

[Baumer]

Well I'm not exactly sure JDog, I've always had the best performance by running AH resolution at the same as my max monitor setting. But there are many other settings that affect the overall look and performance. Working on the screen shot competition really opened my eye's to how much the looks of the game can varied but adjusting your video settings outside of AH. If you haven't seen this post by Waffle on video settings it's a good place to start;

http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,231506.0.html

My opinion is that it's more important to have a good stable frame rate at the best settings you can have, then to worry about very high frame rates with lower settings. However, I'm pretty sure I'm in the minority with that opinion compared to most of the old sticks.

If you're able to get consistent frame rates of 45-60 then I think you'll be happy no matter what settings you use. When I was working with the settings for the screen shots I would record the flight with my standard settings and then before I opened the film viewer I'd go into the NVIDIA 3D settings and max everything out. It made a tremendous difference! O' btw I forgot to set them back once and went into AH, I was only able to get 5fps with everything maxed out!

I'm sure Ghosth and Morf could explain much more, and give differing views to help get you setup best as possible. I can also go over how I've got my settings configured as well if you're interested.

[Ghosth]

Well like Everything to do with AH there at at least 2 schools of thought on everything.

Try this experiment
Set resolution to 800x600, go offline, roll up behind a drone, and at a set distance, say 200 yards, take a screen shot.
Measure the distance, wingtip to wingtip of the enemy. Look carefully at how large it is for a target.

Then go back to your monitor max 1600x resolution setting. Do the same thing at the same distance.
Compare
Look at how much smaller it is.

Remember, with Aces High, gunnery is all done on OUR front end. What you see hits, hits, then packets get sent, recieved, and he then takes the appropriate damage.

So when it comes to shooting, a lower resolution is going to mean a much bigger target at the same distance.
Also if the distance from wingtip to wingtip doubles between low res and high res, then the "Area" that you can hit is going to quadruple.

So like everything else dealing with airplanes it comes down to a balance.
What setting looks good enough to keep you interested, and keeps the targets big enough so you don't get discouraged with your shooting. Where that balance is going to fall is for you to decide. I guess my point in all this is be aware of what your choosing.