Tell me more ×
Game Development Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for professional and independent game developers. It's 100% free, no registration required.
up vote 3 down vote favorite
2

I'm looking for some sort of list with most common game resolutions my game should support.

Regards!

share|improve this question
Also, re-tagged as PC since this isn't relevant on consoles or all the other platforms where resolution is effectively fixed. – MrCranky Aug 16 '10 at 9:00
@MrCranky What about Mac, or mobile devices? Or even browser sizes for Flash/plug-in games. – Adam Harte Aug 16 '10 at 20:06
Well, there's no tag for MacOS (probably should be really). I'll leave it to the original poster to clarify which platform they meant then. I can't think that this would be a useful question if it was meant cross platform. Certainly the fact that they accepted an answer pointing at the Steam Hardware survey would suggest that PC was what they meant... – MrCranky Aug 17 '10 at 10:01

3 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

A good place to start is the Steam Hardware Survey which includes a list of the most popular display resolution among Steam users. Wikipedia has a list of common resolutions in computer graphics. You can also look at some commercial games and see what resolutions they allow the user to select from.

If you're going to support any resolution and just want a list to show to the user, you can query the list of supported resolutions on the player's PC. How you do that depends on the API, for example in SDL you'd use SDL_ListModes.

share|improve this answer
thanks a lot ;) – Balon Aug 14 '10 at 14:15
up vote 5 down vote

I'm pretty sure on Direct X platforms at least, you're expected to query the platform for a list of available modes (using EnumAdapterModes on the device). That way the platform will already exclude any unavailable resolutions (because the GFX card or OS doesn't support it).

You can further sub-filter those modes to exclude any you don't support (for example if you don't support widescreen resolutions), but you certainly shouldn't be defining your own arbitrary list of resolutions and expecting them to map to the set which is actually available.

share|improve this answer
up vote 2 down vote

Unless you plan to target one machine with one predefined set of resolutions, i'd recommend making your game so that it works on any resolution.

If your game has a high range of resolutions it should support (meaning: from very low to very high) in that case it makes sense to leave out things on lower resolution and also to use different graphics sets (e.g. High def textures make no sense on a small handheldscreen).

share|improve this answer
The game supports any resolution, but I would like provide a list of resolutions that the player could choose between. – Balon Aug 14 '10 at 13:48

Your Answer

 
discard

By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.