Hi, I've been developing my first commercial game for the past year and have made it in 640x480 16bpp and have noticed that some video card/drivers don't even go as low as 640x480 anymore!! Is this a potential sales issue? Has anyone else run into this problem or is it negligible for the time being? Thanks

My GeForce2 under WinXP doesn't allow you to set the resolution below 800x600 using the display properties tab. However, if the application tries to set the resolution to 640x480 using DirectDraw or ChangeDisplaySettings, it works fine. So there is really nothing to worry about.

640x480 is the only sure shot resolution. For that reason almost all 3D games start up with that res mode.

If that res mode isn't available the drivers are broken or the user has manually edited it without knowing what s/he is doing. (eg my drivers support some odd res modes like 608x448 too and I had to throw out other modes, wich I can't use like 1600x1200).

>some video card/drivers don't even go as low as 640x480 anymore!!

Examples please.

well for example i installed new drivers for a friend and tested my game... it didn't run at all. I checked the display properties and it wouldn't go into 640x480. I uninstalled the new drivers and the game worked and had the option for 640x480. It was a nVidia tnt2 rave i think. Maybe it was just a bad driver issue, but it got me a little paranoid about my game.

Windows XP doesn't let you set your desktop resolution that low, but full screen games support it just fine. However, every video card that I know of supports 640x480 (unless it's some isa cga card :D)

Do not panic, 640x480 is supported. Hardware and software developers are quite aware about the backward compatability issues :)

How about 8 bit color? Is it supported on the newer cards?

Originally posted by TJM
How about 8 bit color? Is it supported on the newer cards?

Not all. My ATI FireGL 8800 does not support 8 bit modes.

If Microsoft has decided it's not worth it to support 640x480 anymore, I wonder if its time we start developing games with 800x600 as the baseline now?

Originally posted by Punchey
If Microsoft has decided it's not worth it to support 640x480 anymore, I wonder if its time we start developing games with 800x600 as the baseline now?

Yes, I think it is. It's just getting those old games to run a little longer until we can remake them that is the problem.

Our next game (currently in progress) is 800x600...no problems so far (and our artist loves having more pixels to work with), but we haven't done any real testing yet.
-Scorpio

my 2 cents:

When you boot your computer go into the BIOS setup. Check out what resolution that is. Every computer I've ever seen uses 640x480 for the Setup screens becuase it's the only resolution known to work on all VGA monitors.

Hanford

ok i'm glad to hear that... pheww.... i almost had a heart attack when the thought came to mind that newer computers would not be able to play the game i've been working over a year on (part time). Thanks for the support. I'm very anxious to release a beta soon, but i keep finding little things that should be done.