Samsung 204b VS. Viewsonic Vx922

[Frodoenha]

Hi everyone, this is my first post on the forums. I have been looking at a LCD for gaming for about the past 6 months and I have narrowed down my decision to these two monitors but I cannot decide. Besides the obvious difference in size, 20in sam vs 19 viewsonic I was wondering if the resolution difference 1600 for sam and 1280 for viewsonic would make a difference. Is it bad to play games in a resolution other than the native such as playing a game in 1280 on the samsung which has a native 1600. Does that have an impact on the performance? Is it worse to go from a higher native resolution to a lower for gaming or from a lower resolution to a higher for gaming? Thanks and I hope my long essay wasn't too confusing. Basically if price was not an issue which of these two monitors would you choose?

Currently I am running:
AMD Athlon 64 3200+
ATI x800xl 256
1gb Kingston Hyper-X

Viewsonic:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?item=N82E16824116375

Samsung:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16824001226

 

[majoravatar]

Good question. From the perspective of actual size, there isn't much difference between a 19'' and a 20''. So if you were considering the 20'' for that reason, I wouldn't. However, the 20'' is a relative widescreen, which you may want for watching movies. For gaming, however, the clear choice is the viewsonic, although I wouldn't recommend this one for movies. Check out the following post on Tom's hardware:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/03/27/the_spring_2006_lcd_collection/

This article gives a really nice review of the VX922.

As for resolution, you should ALWAYS use native resolution. Once again, if you are a high end gamer (who cares about frame rates) the lower resolution will be your best friend. Although higher resolution look nice, that can be hard for even a good GPU to render quickly.

Just sayin'...