[maranellof1]

a friend of mine told me that gaming is much better on crt monitors because you can pretty much play them on an resolution at full screen (obviously not more than the maxiumum).. but on lcd monitors, one needs to run them at the native resolution... is that correct???
1) what will happen if you run the game at a lower than native resolution??
2) what will happen if you run the game at a higer than native resolution??
3) are crt's more flexible in this respect then???

and another thing that i heard was that although a cinema display would be absolutely immaculate for gaming, one would need the hardware to run it at it's native resolution in order for it to run properly... so i am really confuesed abut all this stuff.. can someone clarify... thanks in advance...

[FallenApple]

Well,
1) It looks like crap (blurry/fuzzy)
2) Impossible
3) Yes
In addition if you do go with a LCD keep in mind that you will want a high quality one that not only can update the screen at a reasonable response time (ghosting) but has better color vibrancy as this is also a shortcoming of LCD monitors.

[d00d]

Honestly, I think you and your friend are a little confused about LCDs. Unlike CRTs, there is a static number of pixels (the native resolution). I don't always run all my games at the full 1600x1200 on my LCD because they run slow. There are resolutions that will make things look blurry/fuzzy but I don't notice too much. However, 800x600 looks perfectly fine (because for every pixel drawn, an exact four pixels draw it (instead of approximation). You can't go higher than the native resolution with an LCD because there's only a certain number of pixels. CRTs can produce more resolutions natively and will be sharper on all, but honestly I don't notice when my monitor is running at a lower resolution any blur.

[maranellof1]

thanks alot for clearing this up... so i guess that cinema displays would no be too good for gaming then.. i mean one would need the hardware for the game to run smoothly at a resolution of 1920x1200... which i suppose is near impossible with the latest 3d games coming out...
just one last question... so in which situation does the screen get cropped... i mean i have seen a couple resolutions in which there is a small picture on the screen (crt)... and then in some situations where the picture is too big to fit on the screen so some edges are cut off (again, crt)... so where do these instances occur??? and are these situations just limmited to crt monitors and not lcd's???
thanks.

[FallenApple]

A screen that is either too large or too small for a CRT display is merely an indication that it has not been calibrated correctly at that resolution/refresh rate. I do not believe LCD's exhibit this behavior.

[snail22]

One slightly annoying thing about LCDs and games is that sometimes it looks like the top half of the screen goes at a slightly different frame rate than the bottom half, this didn't used to happen with my old CRT on the same system. Not a big deal for me, after a while you don't notice it. I'm not sure why this happens though.