Not sure what to think about my my fps

ok there day i hooked my girlfriends monitor up to my computer. it has a res of 1680x 1050. the one i use is 1366x768. the thing is when i used hers it seemed like i was getting higher fps with the same graphics settings. i have an athlon II x2 250 and 512mb 4850. does this make sense or was i drteaming. the game i was playing was need for speed shift with 4xaa and 8x af everything else on max except for motion blur because i dont like it lol. just curious about this. i usually get 40ish fps using fraps on my monitor and i was up in the mid to high 50s with hers.

At lower resolutions you are being CPU bound but at the higher resolution your GPU can actually stretch its legs and do most of the work.

I'm a fan of NFS shift. I just upgraded my monitor to 1920x1080.
Maybe you chose a lower aa when you dialed in your higher resolution. If anyone is familiar with the game, knows that selection is a little different than most games.
Also reasons stated above.
Also different tracks, amount of race cars, racing at dusk can all effect the fps.

This is everything you need to know right here.

The reason you were doing better on the other monitor is becuase your GPU was being used more then the CPU due to the higher resolution. Higher resolution (to a degree), can increase your FPS.

I take it you don't understand the concept behind the term "CPU bottleneck" then?

I also was under the impression that if you increase your resolution your fps will decrease. I am using a 5850 and my native resolution is 1440*900. Do you guyz think if i get a new monitor with native resolution of say 1600*900 or 1680*1050, my 5850 will perform better??

Oh...i forgot to mention my CPU. I am using an i5 750 @ 2.67Ghz, Intel DP55WB mobo, 2GB 1333Mhz DDR3 Ram.

Sorry about dat!

yeah i was gonna mentin the thing about reviews using usually top end cpu to do benchmarks so there are no bottlenecks. i know my cpu isnt very fast but it works pretty well for a 60 dollar cpu and a 110 dollar gpu.