LCD Native Resolutions and Games

[IntegraGSR]

Quick question for you monitor gurus:

I may be upgrading soon (let's hope) and I want to have a quality monitor. This will be a mostly gaming/goofing around computer, up to somewhat good spec for the times.

What kind of quality loss do you get when you change the resolution of your monitor to its non-native setting? I want to have the highest quality and best frames I can pump out without worrying too much about resolution.

The native resolutions for monitors goes up each size progression for LCD monitors, such as 15" is 1024x768, 17" and 19" is 1280x1024 and so on. Now this new computer will probably be able to play most if not all games at 1024x768 with most of the graphical settings at max and enjoy decent frames per second. If I move up to 17" or 19", I want to make sure I have a rig capable of playing games at their native resolutions and still make it an enjoyable experience.

The setup MAY be as follows:
1GB PC3200 RAM
nVidia 6800GT 256 PCI Express x16
AMD Athlon 64 3700+ (1MB Cache)

Can anyone give me some good advice as to what path to take?

[blue60007]

One tip, use a DVI cable, not the VGA cable. When I switched to a DVI cable I could run windows in a lower resolution and not have horrible image quality, it was quite acceptable. I didn't have a problem running games in a lower resolution, but they did look a bit better after switching to a DVI cable. I don't think games will necessarily look bad at a non-native resolution.

[IntegraGSR]

Yeah I was just looking for those options, I figure why even get an LCD monitor if you're still using old VGA technology? I'm definitely getting the DVI option.

[blue60007]

Right, most should come with dual ports, but you might want to check out what comes in the package. Mine has dual ports but came with a cheaper VGA cable...

[kram 2.0]

Seemingly, in games, whether you have native resolution is less a matter than if you use the native resolution in the Windows environment. I run all my games (HL2, BF2, etc) at 1024x768 or 800x600 and they look fine to me. Just be sure to keep the ratio 4:3.

kram

[blue60007]

Right, try scaling text in Photoshop...it's going to look like crap. But scale a photo, and it looks the same. The same thing is going to apply to CRTs.

[flawedreality5]

I have a cheap 17" flat panel and it's native resolution is 1280x1024 and looks real good at it but changing to 1024x768 makes it pretty blurry. It doesn't have DVI though.