Should we drop 1600x900 in VGA Reviews?

[W1zzard]

This would save me 25% of the total bench time, freeing up time for more games.

On the other hand it could be relevant for lower end cards? But going by RX460, everybody still only cares about 1920x1080.

 

[Naito]

Unfortunately it's not a very common native resolution, however I wish it did catch on to replace the terrible 1366x768 resolution found on most notebooks. On the other hand, 900p is only ~70% of the pixels of 1080p, so perhaps with a gap that large, it is still worth keeping in the mix...

EDIT: Going off Steam hardware statistics, it appears it is the 3rd most widely used resolution behind 1080p and 768p. Though, appears to be decreasing slowly.

 

[Steve-007UK]

I've only ever used 1600x900 in Rust because of the 16:9 aspect ratio and because Rust runs crappy at 1080p for me atm, apart from that i dont know anyone who uses 1600x900 res and as tech gets more powerfull these lower res will become obsolete so i see no reason to keep using it.

I also never take any notice of the 1600x900 res in the benchmarks you do, i always skip to 1080p or higher.

 

[silapakorn]

Drop it. Even consoles nowadays are striving for 4K.

 

[chaosmassive]

pls no
most low end graphic card running sub 1080p

or

you could drop 1600x900 for high end gpu
and drop 4k or 1440p for low end gpu
either way you save time both way

 

[W1zzard]

you could drop 1600x900 for high end gpu
and drop 4k or 1440p for low end gpu
either way you save time both way

can't. I need to test all resolutions for all cards, so that I can make the performance summaries

 

[qubit]

Keep it, because it helps to show what the maximum framerate of the CPU is for a particular game. I do look at it when I think the graphs look CPU bottlenecked and quite often they are for the fastest cards, where their true performance isn't shown.

One could even argue for replacing it with 1024x768 to be used specifically for this purpose.

 

[Mussels]

Personally i think we only need 768p*, 1080p, 2K and 4K resolutions.
While other resolutions may be common enough to be considered, they're all close enough that people can use those as a baseline (1080p vs 1200p, 768p vs 720p/1280x1024, etc)

You could save certain higher res stuff (multi monitor?) for specific examples in reviews like crossfire/SLI without them needing to be standard in every review.



*768p really only matters in the mobile segment, so maybe save that for budget/entry level stuff, like IGPs and APUs?

 

[chaosmassive]

can't. I need to test all resolutions for all cards, so that I can make the performance summaries

Well, if that the case keep it then
any GPU cost below 250 USD pushed to the limit on 1080p and still struggle to reach 60 fps
some people may want to lower the resolution to achieve 60+ fps

 

[Maban]

Drop it. Steam hardware survey has it at 6.57% and dropping slowly. The most common sub-1080 resolution is 1366x768 at 25.85% and I'm assuming that >70% of that is laptops.

 

[ZeppMan217]

You can take an educated guess at how well your stuff is gonna perform at sub 1080p levels. Same RX460 as an example - you can see that it gets only 33 FPS in GTA 5, so you know that you won't hit that sweet 60 FPS in 900p.
4 years ago my 7870 was considered mid range. Now a low-mid RX460 delivers superior performance at lower power consumption and price. It's time to move on.

 

[Recon-UK]

1050P would be a good swap since many people still use that res otherwise.... i know no one who uses 900P.

 

[ZeppMan217]

Here's what Steam says.

 

[Maban]

Here's what Steam says.

Sub-1080 resolutions make up 58.11% of the survey.

Crazy idea: keep doing the tests for 1600x900 but just don't include them in the review. If you start to get death threats put them back in.

 

[Yukikaze]

Crazy idea: keep doing the tests for 1600x900 but just don't include them in the review. If you start to get death threats put them back in.

That's a great idea. Drop them from the next review tables (for a lower end card, say the GTX1060 3GB - Speaking of which, will there be a review of that?) and see what happens on user feedback...

 

[D007]

I think so.. You get a good enough idea from the 1080 results anyway, to give you a fair indication of what to expect at 1600x900.

 

[rtwjunkie]

I vote to drop it. It's no longer that common. I think your reviews, because they are for everyone, not just the regular tech-oriented people here on TPU, should reflect what is in common usage.

When 1080p also drops from high usage, I will support dropping it as well.

 

[Outback Bronze]

I voted drop it.

I'm on 4K, with 4K being the norm one day and resolutions will only go up...

 

[AlienIsGOD]

i voted to drop it as well, i dont think its really necessary to have it

When 1080p also drops from high usage, I will support dropping it as well.

i think that will be a far ways off

 

[Toothless]

I still have my 1600x900 and while it would be nice to keep, it's not needed.

I miss them 5760x1080 benchies though.

 

[Assimilator]

If you're gaming at anything lower than 1920x1080, either you're too broke to upgrade (in which case TPU's reviews are mostly for academic purposes), or you're using a laptop (in which case you almost certainly physically cannot upgrade, so again, academic purposes).

Furthermore, this is an enthusiast site; we really aren't interested in weak cards. I feel that any GPU, integrated or discrete, that cannot do 1920x1080 in 2016 is a waste of everyone's time.

Ditch 1600x900.

 

[64K]

This is a tech enthusiast site. That's true but i wonder how many people land on one of W1zzard's reviews that did a Google on a new GPU that aren't tech enthusiasts. It's my understanding that sites make money from traffic so I would say take that into consideration. 1600 x 900 is an oddball resolution and my guess is people can extrapolate their resolution in general from 1080p results if they are on something lower but if most of the major tech sites keep a lower than 1080p resolution then I guess I would to but maybe not 1600 x 900.

Edit: If you did keep a less that 1080p benches it would probably only be useful to people considering an entry level GPU so that would cut out a lot of work.

 

[cdawall]

Drop it. It is next to impossible to even walk into a store and buy a 1600x900 monitor now. They never were the in resolution, quite honestly I don't ever remember them being common.

I would rather more games than a resolution that wasn't popular 5 years ago let alone today.

 

[INSTG8R]

Keep it, because it helps to show what the maximum framerate of the CPU is for a particular game. I do look at it when I think the graphs look CPU bottlenecked and quite often they are for the fastest cards, where their true performance isn't shown.

One could even argue for replacing it with 1024x768 to be used specifically for this purpose.

I voted yes, but I thought the same as qubit regarding CPU effects. But it is time to move forward as CPU bottlenecks should be a rarity these days too.

 

[qubit]

I voted yes, but I thought the same as qubit regarding CPU effects. But it is time to move forward as CPU bottlenecks should be a rarity these days too.

Well, you'd think so, but the TPU review of the latest Titan with the Pascal GPU showed the card to be bottlenecked by the CPU in some instances. I got suspicious when some of the graphs didn't show as high a framerate as I thought it should do. When I compared with the 1600x900 graphs, sure enough you could see that the performance was about the same, proving that the CPU was the bottleneck. That card is extremely fast though, so I'm not surprised that the CPU can't always keep up with it.

I'd dig out a couple of examples for you, but I'm at work and so can only snatch a few moments here and there to look at TPU.