I need to chill? I'm curious to know what about my reply gives the impression I'm not. It's written in essentially the same tone as yours.

Your wording implied something that isn't the case. I was, as you say, merely pointing that out ^^

The problem is that most of those games would not run much above 30fps if they weren't locked, and as such would not run at 60fps by lowering the resolution.

We're talking about games have frame drops below 30 in some cases, meaning their average isn't high enough for  that to happen, and then there are games that can be run unlocked but the average isn't high enough for that to happen either.

Resolution is the last resort of PC gamers. When trying to achieve a balance between performance and quality, we customize everything until the right point..except resolution, which remains untouched. The loss of IQ is not worth the "marginal" performance gain. Other things like AA, shadows, AF, particles, etc, have a greater effect on framerate and don't impact IQ.

You're creating an unnecessary debate and clearly in defense mode.

I'm simply stating some facts, no need to defend the developer's decision.

I didn't even know we were talking about those games inparticular. No wonder I can't win this discussion. :-p

Fact is we would see more game achieving 60 fps (some with dips) if there were more games running at 720p.

I'll end on that.

Unless those devs were willing to release a game at a variable/unstable framerate, we wouldn't, because they'd still lock it at 30fps. 

Its really not that simple.

Imagine that what you see on your screen are two things. One is the canvas and the other is the painting. The canvas is made up of pixels. 720p, 1080p, 4k...etc. The painting is made up of the geometry, textures and lighting.

Now this part is important. All the canvas does is take color information (primarily). So after the GPU has drawn the painting (which is the bulk of the work) it then makes a virtual pixel grid over the painting. Takes note of the color data of every single pixel and then passes that onto the canvas for reproduction. This reproduction is the first part of what is called the frame buffer. The more pixels that make up the canvas, the less pixel artifacts (aliasing/jaggies) you see.

Now back to the canvas. Since pixels are squares and you are drawig on a per pixel basis, there will always be aliasing. So then comes the next part of the frame buffer. post processing. This is where all the other filters to the image are added on a per pixel basis too. AA, bokeh, AF, AO...etc. technically, all you need to eliminate jaggies is just to put in as much AA as you can at this stage. But all those other things mentioned add to the overall quality of the final image. So you have to balance things out.

Thing is, at this point; the bulk of the processing from the cpu/GPU needed to make the image has already been done. All the stuff that really take up resources and has to be in the engine has been done. So the only wiggle room devs have is what they can do on the canvas. Unless they want to completely rewrite big chunks of their engine. 

Now this is the cool part. A 1080p@30fps game would mean that everything I have said above needs to happen in under 33ms. Everything that happens on the painting side of things take up about 20-30ms and everything that happens on the canvas side of it takes up around 3-13ms. Reducing the amount of pixels on the canvas side will give back (a gauranteed) say 3-6ms. But most importantly, this returned render time is STILL on the canvas side of things. So it will only really be used for more post processing or if left unsued, a higher framerate. since the entire process now takes 3ms to 6ms less to complete which could translate to a 5-15fps boost.

To get a game running at 60fps, core design decisions has to be made on the painting side of things. Cause a 60fps has a render time of ~16ms. So everything above needs to be completed in under 16ms. Both the painting and canvas part. This is why its not that simple.

And mind you, this only convers the CPU/GPU and ignores everything else. While in truth, there are a lot of other factors like memory size and bandwidth that dictates how fast you can do any of this and at what quality you do it in. This is also assuming that your game like most modern games today is using a deferred rendering engine. So far the only people that still use a forward rendering egine are mostly nintendo. Its easier to hit 60fps on forward engines but usually at the expense of everything else. Hence why most wiiU games lack AA.

I see alot of text disagreeing with nothing rofl. There is absolutely no misonformation at all.

I did not say a single thing you counter argued.  Neither did I say AA is free  nor did I ever wanted a game to be as crisp as a 1080p game. I just said lower res with AA is sufficient.  Please dont jump to conclusions reading a text.  I even said that I prefer higher resolution with lower polycount etc.

The image i provided is even downsampled from 4k screenshot to 480p. (thus equivalent to 480p With alot of AA  and not "this is exactly how a 480p AA game would look like"


OP pictures are not night and day = fact.
Alot of games would be perfectly playable with FF13 resolution 1024x576p = fact
If a game is 480p without AA it looks shit with AA or better resolution it does not(compared to 480p with no AA) = fact
I prefer higher resolution over more effects and better polycount = fact since its my opinion.
most of games these days are mediocre = fact (well lets say opinion even if its not)
Id rather play a great SNES/PS2 game than a visually top notch mediocre game from 2014 = fact (again my opinion)

All I got from this post is that you didn't read/understand what i was saying to you and why. Nor have you taken the tim to read any more of the numerous bits of information I have put up here. But i am not going to argue with you. I will tell you one thing though...

Downsampling (which is actually called supersampling in AA speak and is the most expensive type of AA) a game from 4k (8.2M+ pixels) to 480p (320k pixels) will require the post processing AA equivalent of over 64xMSAA. Running as much as 8xMSAA cripples most game engines. It will cost you less performance to up the rez of a game from 480p to 720p/1080p than to use 64XMSAA. Way, way, way, way less. And no one said games can't be playable at lower resolutions. That is not what this thread was about. What it was about was if lowering the rez could double the franerate amongst other things.

And as for your opinions, well I am not arguing with them. Never was, so don't know why you are so salty. And your "opinions" of how  games made today is bad and what you would rather play, again has nothing to do with this thread. So you may wanna keep those facts to yourself.

Oh btw, 1080p@60fps with more post processing than you can wave a stick at. Guess even now there is s omething for everyone.

Is your monitor 1080? as what most people conceive as the awful-ness of a lower resolution is just actually how bad scaling is. If you have a 1080p monitor, you want to play games in 1080p because the this gives 1 pixel of the monitor to 1 pixel of video output.

I'm not sure you'd find 768 as bad (for gaming at least) if your monitor had a native vertical resolution of 768. Though obviously you would notice there are less dots on the screen, it would look a lot better than it would on your 1080p display which would have to fake some pixels. The blurriness actually comes from the fact that a lot of pixels on the screen end up having to be parts of 2 different pixels in the image.

This is why SD content (particularly retro games) look way better on CRT monitors than they do on LCD.

How did I miss that? Lol, sorry. That was my bad.