Resolution Question

What does the resolution of something determine, like whats better or worse about higher or lower resolutions

Image resolution does exactly what it says on the box the higher your resolution the better overall image quality you will recieve,the lower your resolution the more "blocky" things will look as you see the textures getting up close and personal, heres an experiment you can do to see for yourself, try running a game at 640x480 then try it again at 1024x768, it will speak for itself.

what it actually means is the number of pixels you have in terms of width and height on your monitor. For instance if you run a game at 1280x1024 then you have 1280 pixels (tiny colored dots) from left to right, and 1024 pixels from the bottom to the top.

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that would be a resolution of 5x3

as vampiro said, by increasing the resolution you display more pixels on the screen at once. usually this means that things close to the screen, such as the weapon you might be holding, or the character you're looking at, gets smaller. this is because the screen has to display something that it wouldn't display at a lower resolution, so it displays stuff farther to the side and up/down.

also, by increasing the resolution you get less visible jagged edges, because when you have more pixels the jaggies are less likely to occur. Even though I use a radeon 9800xt, which can run most games at 1600x1200 I actually prefer to use something between 1024x768 and 1280x1024 in most games. This is because I like the size of things at those resolutions, and because you (or at least I) can use various levels of anti-aliasing (to kill jaggies) and anisotropic filtering (to make textures crisper).

thanks vampiro, and interman, i already knew it meant the amount of pixels, but vampiro gave me the answer i was looking for. thx. and by the way, i know what pixels, anti-aliasing, and anistrophic filtering is already