I don't get resolution. And when I go into stores, or I read about it, I continue to not get it.
This is the sort of thread that comes up a lot, and I've read through them, but I just... can't fully wrap my head around a couple of things. Partly because some people seem to not get it.
So, on my desktop, I've got 1920x1200 and when I compare that to my 1080 display I can see that equates to a couple extra rows displayed in excel.
That said, if I go look at a retina macbook pro, it shows less rows.
Now I've found that this is because of how the software interprets the info coming out and it sort of makes the display effectively 1650x1050 because to make it 2500 or whatever retina is would make text too small to read.
My question is, how does this relate to games and movies?
Sometimes I look at screen shot comparisons and I'm like, I can definitely see more to the left and right at 1080 than at 720. There is literally more information being shown. But sometimes it looks exactly the same.
Like, what's going on here with starcraft 2:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_i...
And does aspect ratio matter more than resolution? Is that really the key?
It doesn't make sense that movies could actually show larger landscapes so in that case, what's going on when a movie is displayed at 720 vs 1080. If you have a 1080 monitor watching a movie, do you see more to the left and to the right, like more of the shot? This seems unlikely.
Likewise, what's happening when I put the resolution up to 1080 on a youtube video but I don't expand it to full screen? It looks crisper, but it can't be showing 1080 because there aren't 1080 pixels in that small space.
I have read a lot of articles on this, and even gone into mac stores and best buys and tried to get someone there to give me a quick run through, but it just never light bulbs for me.
Thanks ahead of time.
TL;DR
How does resolution effect displayed information? Do you actually see more game at higher resolutions? Does it change from game to game? Does it change from movie to movie?
Does a dual or triple monitor set up change how much displayed information you see?