In alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt Coffee Lover
wrote:

I got my resolution AS high as possible right now.
I read/heard the higher the resolution, you get a drop in performance?
1280 X 1024 right now, what's a good one for performance?

Or does it matter????????

Depends on your CPU speed and your card capability.
For most even reasonably recent boards I usually use 1600x1200 for the
desktop.
Higher resolution makes most things too small.
Even with that resolution, I pick large icons and adjust the font sizes.
By doing that, things look a lot better.
Large scaled fonts on a higher resolution machine are just easier on the
eye than small fonts on a lower resolution machine scaled to the same
size. They're just finer grained; and the eye sees them better.

The bigger the monitor, the more resolution you need.
On a 17" monitor, 1024x768 is probably enough.
For a 19", I'd go with what you got.
For something bigger, go higher.
For an LCD monitor, go with "native resolution".
(My LCD, for example, is 1680x1050 ... just a tad better than a 21" CRT
at 1600x1200.)

Games are different.
There you keep raising the resolution until you see the response-time of
the game drop. Once that happens, you drop down one step. Each game
will likely be different in this. Choose as much hardware acceleration
as your board and game will permit. Sometimes there's a trade-off
between hardware techniques like shading and resolution. That you have
to experiment with to see which looks best to you.

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