Playing games in native monitor resolution, bad....?

My LCD monitor has a native resolution of: 1280 x 1024.

BUT, my x1900xtx, likes to go higher than that. Should I play my games in that resoltion or a higher one. I read that it is good to play at your monitors native resoltion, but i want bigger and better....

I want the best image quality. THink I should play in native, or go up higher, to like 1600 x....

buy a new monitor.

i think id better point out that AFAIK it is physically impossible to go above the native res. LCD monitors have only so many pixels. you need a different monitor to go higher.

If you can set resolution higher than natural monitor resolution, then monitor will down-convert it to the natural resolution. You will still see the same amount of pixels, though they will be somewhat smoothed out. The process is somewhat similar to anti-aliasing (AA of FSAA), except that instead of improving quality of the image, the quality will be worse. Only if you go to really high resolution you can get quality improvement similar to AA.

For example, in order to imitate 2x AA, you have to have resolution 2 times higher both vertically and horizontally, i.e. 4 times more pixels. Needless to say that you will have huge hit for performance. So instead of that just put AA on x2 and enjoy the same results with minimal loss in performance.

Overall, it is always better to use AA than increased resolution for monitors with fixed number of pixels, such as LCD