The effects of resolution on users playing first person shooter games

Computer games are often played on devices with varying display resolutions. While higher resolutions generally provide more immersive game play they can yield reduced frame rates and/or increased costs, making choosing the optimal resolution important. Despite this importance, to the best of our knowledge, there has been no extensive study of the effects of resolution on users playing computer games. This paper presents results from extensive user studies measuring the impact of resolution on users playing First Person Shooter games. The studies focus on the effects of resolution in conjunction with low and high contrast virtual environments, full screen and windowed modes and identification of long-range objects. Analysis indicates resolution has little impact on performance over the range of conditions tested and only matters when the objects being identified are far away or small and are reduced to too few pixels to be distinguishable.