Automated screen resolutions research

qptain Nemo · Thu 27/10/2011 17:15:36

Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to ask you to help a fellow indie developer to get a better idea of what resolutions are actually available to people out there so I can be prepared to handle them better. You may easily do so by running a simple program I wrote that lists available resolutions which can be downloaded from this link http://lazyandsleepy.org/listres.exe. It outputs the list into a file named listres.txt in the same directory as the program itself. I'd like you to post its contents to something like http://pastebin.com/ and post the link here or send it to my email (in my profile) if you're shy or get it to me in any other way you like. You may also use any other method of gathering all of your available resolutions but I'd be very grateful if it's at least as complete and detailed as my program's output.

Any additional notes that you may provide on how you use your resolutions are very welcome.

Thank you.

Igor Hardy · Thu 27/10/2011 17:25:37

I understand you're the "fellow indie developer"? For a second there I thought you're asking for help for a friend and got confused over the meaning of the whole message.

qptain Nemo · Thu 27/10/2011 17:26:43

Quote from: Ascovel on Thu 27/10/2011 17:25:37
I understand you're the "fellow indie developer"? For a second there I thought you're asking for help for a friend and got confused over the meaning of the whole message.

Yes, yes, I meant myself.

Kastchey · Thu 27/10/2011 17:27:01

Like this?
http://pastebin.com/AYwtmVKQ

qptain Nemo · Thu 27/10/2011 17:27:45

Quote from: Kastchey on Thu 27/10/2011 17:27:01
Like this?
http://pastebin.com/AYwtmVKQ

Yup, thanks a lot, Kastchey and everybody else who does this!

Calin Leafshade · Thu 27/10/2011 17:44:22

I suggest you take a look at the Valve Hardware Survey.

Google is your friend.

qptain Nemo · Thu 27/10/2011 17:54:31

Quote from: Calin Leafshade on Thu 27/10/2011 17:44:22
I suggest you take a look at the Valve Hardware Survey.

Google is your friend.

Thanks for your concern, but I thought making a little independent research would be still interesting even in the light of much bigger surveys having been already done for numerous reasons. Especially because of its small scale where little obscure details can be seen that would be overlooked and lost in larger statistical base. Also it's interesting to survey specifically people here, who are mostly adventure gamers because they are my primary audience.
And lastly, Valve's survey doesn't seem to give me quite the same information as what I'm trying to collect here. What I want is exactly the full list of available resolutions, not just the most popular active resolutions. For example I'm very curious to determine how many systems can still initialize a genuine 640x480 screen resolution. Valve's survey doesn't tell me that.
However, Valve's survey does have some interesting stats, so thanks anyway.

Khris · Thu 27/10/2011 18:50:15

Here you go: http://pastebin.com/Dz5kYn2H
The last two seem weird

TomatoesInTheHead · Thu 27/10/2011 21:17:15

Quote from: LeKhris on Thu 27/10/2011 18:50:15
The last two seem weird

Same here. http://pastebin.com/utH6Mtmb

m0ds · Sun 30/10/2011 16:28:19

Certainly. Using an older machine though at the moment.

http://pastebin.com/1dSWxv1s

qptain Nemo · Sun 30/10/2011 16:43:25

Thank you, guys!

These 1 Hz modes indeed look strange, I've got them on my computer too, and there's no doubt they're not real, but I don't know why windows reports them.

Quote from: Mods on Sun 30/10/2011 16:28:19
Certainly. Using an older machine though at the moment.

That's good. Information about very old/new/unusual systems is valueable.

TomatoesInTheHead · Sun 30/10/2011 20:06:25

Another list of resolutions from my newer laptop I'm currently only using for work related things (but will ultimately use for games, too, when the beloved old laptop eventually dies): http://pastebin.com/iYLLSPEw

Tuomas · Sun 30/10/2011 20:13:21

Here's what I've got

http://pastebin.com/dbiES2ES

Ubel · Mon 31/10/2011 13:13:13

Ran on my netbook.

http://pastebin.com/2SkG5nNy

Eigen · Mon 31/10/2011 16:31:27

May I ask, how are these lists useful to you? I mean .. every display supports 800 x 600 and other common resolutions like that. The only useful piece of data, at least that I see, is the native resolution of different computers. Knowing that 848 x 480 is available .. how does that help you?

My screen is 1280 x 800. In full-screen, when possible, I use that. When playing in windowed mode, I prefer 800 x 600 because that fits the screen best vertically. I hate it when games run in 1024 x 768 in windowed mode and no way to change it. It just doesn't fit. But it's very common. And so, for my game (not AGS related) I'm going for 800 x 600, because it seemed okay to have 800 as the minimum height. It should fit most of the laptops .. I'm not worrying about desktops.

edit: Also, with today's widescreens, it's the aspect ratio you should be worried about. If you make an 1024 x 768 (4:3) background image and display it full-screen on an 1280 x 800 (16:10) device then you're going to have troubles.

qptain Nemo · Mon 31/10/2011 23:30:59

Thanks again TomatoesInTheHead and Tuomas. And Pablo, thanks, mate. ^_^

Quote from: Eigen on Mon 31/10/2011 16:31:27
May I ask, how are these lists useful to you? I mean .. every display supports 800 x 600 and other common resolutions like that. The only useful piece of data, at least that I see, is the native resolution of different computers. Knowing that 848 x 480 is available .. how does that help you?

My screen is 1280 x 800. In full-screen, when possible, I use that. When playing in windowed mode, I prefer 800 x 600 because that fits the screen best vertically. I hate it when games run in 1024 x 768 in windowed mode and no way to change it. It just doesn't fit. But it's very common. And so, for my game (not AGS related) I'm going for 800 x 600, because it seemed okay to have 800 as the minimum height. It should fit most of the laptops .. I'm not worrying about desktops.

edit: Also, with today's widescreens, it's the aspect ratio you should be worried about. If you make an 1024 x 768 (4:3) background image and display it full-screen on an 1280 x 800 (16:10) device then you're going to have troubles.

Sure, I'll gladly explain. I'm not claiming this survey is super vital but there're several ways in which that information can be considerably helpful.
Firstly, you say that every monitor supports common resolutions. Well, let me just admit, I didn't know that. With all laptops and the whole fashion of going widescreen I wasn't at all sure if I can just go and initialize 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768 as the screen resolution with no worries. Turns out, every system still supports all these.

Secondly, let's say I make a pixel art game in 320x240. The minority of systems still support that resolution so I can't count on being able use it in fullscreen and no one is gonna squint at it in windowed mode either. So obviously, it's gonna get displayed scaled. Which in case of fullscreen mode means picking up the display resolution and scaled game resolution that are closest to each other so it can get displayed with minimum black space around the game picture. That process would be of course a purely automatic calculation, but still I feel a bit more comfortable programming it knowing what actual values are gonna be there.

As you can see, these two moments can affect the choice of a fixed resolution for a game considerably.

Thirdly, knowing the available resolutions and how widescreen the widescreen things exactly are would help designing not-so-fixed resolution games and guis and so on. I don't know if I'm expressing my point well here, but knowing that some people will have extra space here and there and some won't kinda feels better than just blind approximate guessing.

Fourthly, if I'm not mistaken, the indeed important information about aspect ratio could be salvaged from these values without much risk of an error.

And lastly, the refresh rate. The refresh rate is pretty much the limit of frames per second it'd make sense to render so knowing what that actually would be for many users seems quite useful to me. It seems that in the most cases rendering more than 60 fps wouldn't be necessary because most of people use LCD displays or use their highest available resolution on CRT ones. Until everybody has high-tech LCD ones that support 120 Hz refresh rate that is.

As a bonus as you can see I collected the resolutions people actually use at the moment of running the program which tells something about their preferences and what resolution is the most usable to them. And well, it's just an interesting little experiment even if the point is just to see if there would be any actually unexpected results or not.

So in essence, yeah, I could do without it, but I feel more comfortable with actual numbers lying around so I can peek anytime and see how much sense each approach to using resolutions makes. Thank you for telling me your preferences, by the way!

Jim Reed · Tue 01/11/2011 00:14:00

http://pastebin.com/MCguE9LX

Dualnames · Tue 01/11/2011 01:16:21

Quote from: qptain Nemo on Mon 31/10/2011 23:30:59
Thanks again TomatoesInTheHead and Tuomas. And Pablo, thanks, mate. ^_^

Quote from: Eigen on Mon 31/10/2011 16:31:27
May I ask, how are these lists useful to you? I mean .. every display supports 800 x 600 and other common resolutions like that. The only useful piece of data, at least that I see, is the native resolution of different computers. Knowing that 848 x 480 is available .. how does that help you?

My screen is 1280 x 800. In full-screen, when possible, I use that. When playing in windowed mode, I prefer 800 x 600 because that fits the screen best vertically. I hate it when games run in 1024 x 768 in windowed mode and no way to change it. It just doesn't fit. But it's very common. And so, for my game (not AGS related) I'm going for 800 x 600, because it seemed okay to have 800 as the minimum height. It should fit most of the laptops .. I'm not worrying about desktops.

edit: Also, with today's widescreens, it's the aspect ratio you should be worried about. If you make an 1024 x 768 (4:3) background image and display it full-screen on an 1280 x 800 (16:10) device then you're going to have troubles.
Sure, I'll gladly explain. I'm not claiming this survey is super vital but there're several ways in which that information can be considerably helpful.
Firstly, you say that every monitor supports common resolutions. Well, let me just admit, I didn't know that. With all laptops and the whole fashion of going widescreen I wasn't at all sure if I can just go and initialize 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768 as the screen resolution with no worries. Turns out, every system still supports all these.

Secondly, let's say I make a pixel art game in 320x240. The minority of systems still support that resolution so I can't count on being able use it in fullscreen and no one is gonna squint at it in windowed mode either. So obviously, it's gonna get displayed scaled. Which in case of fullscreen mode means picking up the display resolution and scaled game resolution that are closest to each other so it can get displayed with minimum black space around the game picture. That process would be of course a purely automatic calculation, but still I feel a bit more comfortable programming it knowing what actual values are gonna be there.

As you can see, these two moments can affect the choice of a fixed resolution for a game considerably.

Thirdly, knowing the available resolutions and how widescreen the widescreen things exactly are would help designing not-so-fixed resolution games and guis and so on. I don't know if I'm expressing my point well here, but knowing that some people will have extra space here and there and some won't kinda feels better than just blind approximate guessing.

Fourthly, if I'm not mistaken, the indeed important information about aspect ratio could be salvaged from these values without much risk of an error.

And lastly, the refresh rate. The refresh rate is pretty much the limit of frames per second it'd make sense to render so knowing what that actually would be for many users seems quite useful to me. It seems that in the most cases rendering more than 60 fps wouldn't be necessary because most of people use LCD displays or use their highest available resolution on CRT ones. Until everybody has high-tech LCD ones that support 120 Hz refresh rate that is.

As a bonus as you can see I collected the resolutions people actually use at the moment of running the program which tells something about their preferences and what resolution is the most usable to them. And well, it's just an interesting little experiment even if the point is just to see if there would be any actually unexpected results or not.

So in essence, yeah, I could do without it, but I feel more comfortable with actual numbers lying around so I can peek anytime and see how much sense each approach to using resolutions makes. Thank you for telling me your preferences, by the way!

2 LONG 2 REED. LOL.

Automated screen resolutions research

m0ds