Do casual gamers have 640 * 480 as their default setup?

[alfie]

Hi All,

Do casual gamers have 640 * 480 as their default setup? If so, any research or stats on what proportions have this as a default resolution?

Any other insights on resolution for the casual market appreciated.

[Mike Boeh]

No, they have 800x600 or 1024x768....

[James C. Smith]

Well, since Windows XP requires a minimum of 800 X 600, I think you will find that a very large portion of the casual gamers have something higher than 640 X 480. Sorry I don't have exact stats. I am sure someone will be along soon with some numbers. But I would be willing to bet a lot of money that at least 40% of the players who commonly download games from casual games portals are running their desktop at something higher than 640 X 480.

Of course, I still wouldn’t make a game that requires a desktop resolution higher than 640 X 480. I wouldn’t want to needlessly explode anyone.

FYI: All the downloadable games I have worked on in the past few years run full screen at 800X600. The user’s desktop resolution is ignored. These games include Ricochet Lost Worlds, Wik & the Fable of Souls, and Big Kahuna Reef. Those are all 800X600 games.

[alfie]

Retro64 "No, they have 800x600 or 1024x768"

Thanks Mike.

James "Of course, I still wouldn’t make a game that requires a desktop resolution higher than 640 X 480. I wouldn’t want to needlessly explode anyone."

The game I am working on (using MMF) is full screen with a frame size of 800*600, but the users can minimise the game (boss walk in key). So, if I change the users resolution on game boot and they minimise the game then their isnt a way to reset the users original resolution.

[Sirrus]

Well, since Windows XP requires a minimum of 800 X 600, I think you will find that a very large portion of the casual gamers have something higher than 640 X 480. Sorry I don't have exact stats. I am sure someone will be along soon with some numbers. But I would be willing to bet a lot of money that at least 40% of the players who commonly download games from casual games portals are running their desktop at something higher than 640 X 480.

Of course, I still wouldn’t make a game that requires a desktop resolution higher than 640 X 480. I wouldn’t want to needlessly explode anyone.

FYI: All the downloadable games I have worked on in the past few years run full screen at 800X600. The user’s desktop resolution is ignored. These games include Ricochet Lost Worlds, Wik & the Fable of Souls, and Big Kahuna Reef. Those are all 800X600 games.

You have an option for windowed mode I assume? What resolution do you set Windowed to for your titles?

[Anthony Flack]

I wouldn't want you to needlessly explode anyone either. There's quite enough of that going on as it is.

[soniCron]

You have an option for windowed mode I assume? What resolution do you set Windowed to for your titles? I would assume 800x600.

[PoV]

Lets put this another way. Despite weather a user runs their desktop at 640x480 res or something higher, what are the odd's that their computer setup support 800x600 or higher fullscreen? I'd say it's pretty good, almost a guarentee.

Sure, you're going to have 1 guy out of a few million that's on the internet looking for downloadable games, that just happens to be on an old 13" EGA/VGA monitor that can't sync higher than 640x480. But if he's too cheap to buy a new monitor, is he really going to spend $20 on your game? Not likely.

So yeah, if you test the desktop resolution is 1024x768 or higher before you run your app in a window, otherwise you run fullscreen. I'd be willing to bet on that.

In my opinion, the only thing going against 800x600 is performance, which would be an issue of color depth as well.

[soniCron]

Here are memory requirements (which determine maximum resolution, of course + driver and monitor capabilities) for 800x600:


8 Bit - ~468KB
16 Bit - ~937KB
24 Bit - ~1.4MB
32 Bit - ~1.9MB


Now, when was the last time you saw a video card with < 4MB RAM? My bud had a decent card back in '95 that he ran at 800x600@24 Bit (though he found 16 Bit was much faster). You're kicking a (very) dead horse. The question you should be asking is: What color depth should I use at 800x600? For that I'd say 8 Bit (for extreme compatability and speed).

[Robert Cummings]

My old pentium classic 200mhz with s3 trio 64 (with 2 megs of ram) did everything just fine and was very happy with 800x600. 640 was never used by me.

The 640x480 thing is mainly for speed purposes, nothing more. I think I can get away with using 800x600 and I will. I have no plans to support 640x480 - it isn't worth the code.

The question you should be asking is: What color depth should I use at 800x600? For that I'd say 8 Bit (for extreme compatability and speed).That's more trouble than it's worth and looks ugly. No place for it in this day and age.

[Gnatinator]

That's more trouble than it's worth and looks ugly. No place for it in this day and age. If you do it correctly, it can look very good (take starcraft for example, awesome use of palettes). But if you dont have the skills/knowhow, then it would be a better option to stick with 32/16 bit.

32 bit is getting more and more common, its much easier to work in it and its fairly fast on todays common hardware. I highly reccomend it (Esp if you are using opengl for blitting).

[Anthony Flack]

Hey Joseph, there's a guy over here who's slagging off 8-bit colour!

It depends on what style you're going for. There are times when it's still a good choice. Increasingly few, I admit, but... um, Lexaloffle still likes 8-bit.

[James C. Smith]

The game I am working on (using MMF) is full screen with a frame size of 800*600, but the users can minimise the game (boss walk in key). So, if I change the users resolution on game boot and they minimise the game then their isnt a way to reset the users original resolution.

If you game is change resolutions to run "full screen" then you better restore the resolution when you app gets minimized. If your desktop is set to 1024 X 768, and you run Ricochet Lost Worlds, the game will set the video card to 800 X 600 to run the game full screen. But if you press Alt-Tab while playing Ricochet, Ricochet gets minimized and you return to your 1024 X 768 desktop (the user’s desktop resolution is restored). If you then click on Ricochet in your task bar, the game sets the video rez back to 800 X 600 again. This is how most games work. I would say 95% of the "full screen" games I have played allow you to minimize the game and they restore the video rez to your desktop resolution. I think if you use Direct Draw this is automatic. (or maybe we just added it to our framework 8 years ago and forgot about it) but in Open GL games this takes more work but is still very doable. I have played a few games that don't restore the desktop resolution when the game is minimized and this drives me nuts! The new "shareware" Chowder game (from the maker of snood) is one of the 5% games that don't do this properly and annoys the heck out of me.

[James C. Smith]

You have an option for windowed mode I assume? What resolution do you set Windowed to for your titles?

Some of our games have an option to run in a window and some do not. All of them default to full screen. The games that can run in a window create an 800 X 600 window. This does not work well on a desktop that is 800 X 600 or smaller.

[alfie]

If you game is change resolutions to run "full screen" then you better restore the resolution when you app gets minimized.

Totally agree with you, but as I am using Multimedia Fusion as my dev tool it's not doable :(

[Pyabo]

Saw a funny thread topic yesterday at the PopCap dev forum:

"800x600 is the new 640x480"

:)

[dxgame]

"The question you should be asking is: What color depth should I use at 800x600? For that I'd say 8 Bit (for extreme compatability and speed)."

UGH! Give me 16 or 32bit color at 640x480 any day over 800x600x256. :eek:

[soniCron]

UGH! Give me 16 or 32bit color at 640x480 any day over 800x600x256. :eek: Maybe I shall repeat what I said:

"For that I'd say 8 Bit (for extreme compatability and speed)."

There's no question 16 and 32 bit is better than 8 bit. But if the guy is asking if 640x480 is the default setup, he may be interested in targetting a lower common denominator. On cards that can barely support 32 bit color, the issue is no longer whether the card could handle it, but if the computer could handle all that data. Computers with cards that old aren't the tough guys we've seen in the last 5-7 years. So *pbst* :p

[Valkilos]

I actually was looking over some numbers from our weblogs at The Day Job for this exact thing. The main product of the company is not apps or tech, so there's no reason why we'd attract people with more technical aptitude or better machines than the general population. In fact, given some of my conversations with customers, the very opposite might be true :D

I don't have the numbers in front of me, so there's some heavy rounding in most of this. Also, keep in mind that this is only the default resolution of their desktop, NOT the maximum resolution they can handle.

640x480 - less than 0.5%
800x600 - 20%
1024x768 - 50%
1280x1024 - 25%

The remaining 5% was assorted wierd stuff (1600x1200, 1152x864, etc.) and "unknown"s.

[Batley]

I think 640x480 is mainly used by people with eye sight trouble.

800x600 are people who still use a 15 inch monitor.

1024X768 are mainly used by 17inch monitors which are sold as standard with new pc's.

1280x1024 are mainly used by people with a 19inch or higher monitor sizes.

[Robert Cummings]

1280x1024 is also used by the majority of 17" LCD's made within the last year or two, as these default to that res generally.

[Batley]

1280x1024 is also used by the majority of 17" LCD's made within the last year or two

By the majority, I don't think thats true at all.

[Phil Steinmeyer]

For any website that uses sitemeter for stats (look for the little logo somewhere on the page), you can usually click on that logo, then click on 'Monitor Resolution' to see the destkop rez of visitors to that site in the past 24 hours or so.

For instance, here's the data for my site
http://www.sitemeter.com/default.asp?action=stats&site=sm6psteinx&report=73
Note **0** users at 640 x 480 and only 2% at 800 x 600. My site skews towards higher end users (i.e. game developers rather than players), but you could look for a site that targets a demographic similar to your projected customers that uses sitemeter and look there.

[alfie]

That's a good idea Phil, thanks for the suggestion :)

[soniCron]

By the majority, I don't think thats true at all. Uhm. Yes. It is.

[Savant]

Uhm. Yes. It is.
Does someone have a link to some facts to back this sort of thing up or are we going to "Yes it is"/"No it isn't" all day?

[soniCron]

Does someone have a link to some facts to back this sort of thing up or are we going to "Yes it is"/"No it isn't" all day? I can't believe you're seriously asking for this, but ok:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?type=category&id=cat01010
http://www.circuitcity.com/rpsm/catOid/-12965/N/20012961+20012965+159+161/link/ref/rpem/ccd/categorylist.do
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?Manufactory=&PropertyCodeValue=0&PropertyCodeValue=1056%3A9096&PropertyCodeValue=0&PropertyCodeValue=0&PropertyCodeValue=0&PropertyCodeValue=0&PropertyCodeValue=0&PropertyCodeValue=0&PropertyCodeValue=0&PropertyCodeValue=0&PropertyCodeValue=0&description=&MinPrice=&MaxPrice=&SubCategory=20&Submit=Property

[Savant]

No, obviously the monitors can support that resolution. What isn't clear is if people are using it at that res.

[soniCron]

No, obviously the monitors can support that resolution. What isn't clear is if people are using it at that res. First, it's not that they "support" that resolution, that resolution is their native resolution. Second, on the last 6 LCDs I installed for family and friends, the display automatically got set to the monitor's native resolution (1280x1024). Are people actually keeping that resolution? Who knows. Who cares. But Bately said:

1024X768 are mainly used by 17inch monitors which are sold as standard with new pc's. Which is false. 17 inch LCDs are the most common montitors sold as standard with new PC's, and the native resolution of said monitors is almost certain to be 1280x1024, which is what the OEM will set the resolution.

Nobody can know what resolution people are actually running their LCDs in, but we do know the gobs of resolution data that people keep posting to this thread. What type of monitor runs what doesn't matter. It's a non-issue. I'm not entirely sure what you're arguing about! ;)

[Savant]

I guess my argument was that replies like:

Uhm. Yes. It is.

...aren't useful for furthering discussion.

That's all.

[Allen Varney]

I don't have an LCD monitor, but I was under the impression you couldn't change their resolution. Did I misunderstand?

[soniCron]

I don't have an LCD monitor, but I was under the impression you couldn't change their resolution. Did I misunderstand? They can't. But they all have hardware support for stretching or centering lower resolutions.

[Batley]

Some do come as 1280x1024, but most are set at 1024x768 out of the box, like mine.

[James C. Smith]

I don't have an LCD monitor, but I was under the impression you couldn't change their resolution. Did I misunderstand?
You can’t change how many pixels are on the LCD, but you can still tell the video card to output a different signal and the LCD will still display it. As soniCron said, the LCD will either stretch or center the image. But I just wanted to make it clear that there are no additional limit on what the user can set their desktop resolution to just because they have a 1024 X 768 (or whatever rez) display. They can still select desktop resolutions in Windows from 800 X 600 to 1600 X 1280 (or whatever) and most users don’t understand that those modes are less than ideal on their LCD. Most users are completely unaware that their LCD monitor has a fixed resolution because Windows lets them pick any resolution and the monitor displays it.

[soniCron]

Some do come as 1280x1024, but most are set at 1024x768 out of the box, like mine. Are you sure? (http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?t=3619&p=48007#post48007) ;) Where do you get your information?