How is this possible?

[Mesmerist]

Hello all. I need help with a question that I find myself unable to answer. 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!

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AnandTech Moderator

 

[stebesplace]

a few things come to mind. . .

When you 'bump' down the settings, is the game automatically putting it in software mode? If so, that will greatly decrease your performance. There are some drivers that might just be made to be put at higer resolutions to perform at their peak, otherwise they may fink out and not do what you want at a lower 800x600, for example. . .BUT it sounds as though it is switching in the game from hardware to software rendering.

What happens within windows, or other games, applications? Does it do the same thing with all games? If it does, then it sounds like something hardware, or driverwise that is automatically setting it to do crappy bit rate, software etc. . .check to see that you have full control in your control panel for your video card.

Hope this may help.

-Steve