tft monitor resolution

[mikeald]

i have a 17 inch tft monitor, and a radeon 9800 pro graphics card, and have recently been playing doom 3 - very impressive. Resolution of 1280 x 1024. Runs smooth as silk, I know this is good, but what exdactly is the difference between this and say 800 x 600? I know the quality, but how is it measured? is this the amount of lines on the monitor or dots per inch?

hope i dont appear to thick!

cheers

mike

[RJ]

Do you mean, why lower resolutions don't appear sharp, like the native resolution does ?

Well, a TFT has a fixed resolution. Your TFT has 1280 pixels horizontal, and 1024 pixels vertical, so it can only display a picture with 1280x1024 sharp at full screen, because only then one pixel of the image can be displayed by one pixel of the monitor.

If you want to display 800x600 at full screen, the display needs to interpolate, because it can't display 800x600. All it displays is 1280x1024, and nothing else. So the 800x600 gets stretched to 1280x1024, and that is where the sharpness gets lost.

RJ