Hello all. I posted this under "Highly Technical", but it was locked there for being off-topic. While I disagree (it is QUITE technical imho), I need input on a question that I find myself unable to answer, so I'll see if our scrupulous moderators will allow such a thread to exist here. If anyone can help, I would appreciate it greatly!
I have a friend who has a decently-equipped gaming rig, sporting an Athlon 2100+, 1GB DDR RAM, ATI Radeon 8500, etc. In many of his games, the framerate increases when he raises the resolution. For example, increasing the framerate in Tribes 2 from 800x600 to 1024x768 results in a net gain of 15-20 FPS. The same thing occurs in other games, such as Jedi Knight 2. Furthermore, enabling extra graphical features such as trilinear filtering, hi-res textures, and volumetric fog tend to result in a framerate increase as well. When we bump these setting sback down, sure enough, the framerate goes back down too. We popped in a GeForce 3 Ti500 and the same thing happened. Not that this is a bad thing, but it does raise an interesting question (to me, at least). How can this be? My friend came to me since I know a fair amount about computer hardware, but I couldn't help him. Can you help me answer this one? Thanks guys!
I have a friend who has a decently-equipped gaming rig, sporting an Athlon 2100+, 1GB DDR RAM, ATI Radeon 8500, etc. In many of his games, the framerate increases when he raises the resolution. For example, increasing the framerate in Tribes 2 from 800x600 to 1024x768 results in a net gain of 15-20 FPS. The same thing occurs in other games, such as Jedi Knight 2. Furthermore, enabling extra graphical features such as trilinear filtering, hi-res textures, and volumetric fog tend to result in a framerate increase as well. When we bump these setting sback down, sure enough, the framerate goes back down too. We popped in a GeForce 3 Ti500 and the same thing happened. Not that this is a bad thing, but it does raise an interesting question (to me, at least). How can this be? My friend came to me since I know a fair amount about computer hardware, but I couldn't help him. Can you help me answer this one? Thanks guys!