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Make the Most of your Monitor and Graphics Card As David Dorn points out, you’ve got lots of processing power in your graphics adapter – but are you getting the best out of it? The first in a short series of articles looks at resolutions and colour depths. It might not bear thinking about, but today’s graphics adapters quite often have more RAM on them than was in a “professional” PC of a mere five years ago, and quite probably have more processing power on them than a fairly heavy duty computer of a year or two before that. With RAM complements on graphics adapters being, these days, a minimum of eight megabytes of RAM (enough to run Windows 95 relatively smoothly), it’s maybe the case that you’re not getting the best performance out of the board in your PC. I can say this with some certainty, because I’ve got the figures to prove it. As part of our constant quest to make sure that Practical PC is the magazine you want, we track certain statistics – nothing to get worried about – like what resolutions and colour depths the computers you use have. For the month of July, these are the figures:
Looking at these statistics, it’s easy to see that most people have their desktop set at a resolution of 800x600, and most use 16 bit colour. Just out of interest, that would involve using just under a Megabyte of your graphics adapter’s RAM, so, even if you’ve got a four megabyte adapter, and you’re at 800x600x16bit, you’re not using three quarters of what you’ve paid for. That 11% of people still using a resolution of 640x480 is also worthy of note. No doubt a lot of people would wonder why anyone is still using such a low resolution, when today’s kit can go as far as 1920x1440, and even higher. The answer is, probably, the user’s monitor, or its selection in Windows, since even a 1MB graphics adapter can do 800x600, as we’ve seen. Let me explain. When you add a graphics adapter to Windows – no matter what flavour of adapter or Windows itself – Windows assumes nothing other than that it’s capable of displaying 640 pixels across the screen and 480 down the screen. Indeed, 640x480 is Windows’ default resolution. More than that, it also assumes that it’s capable of displaying just 16 colours at first. In other words, Windows assumes that the graphics adapter in your machine is a bog standard VGA card (a long out-moded standard, to tell the truth).
In the same way that Windows detects graphics cards, it can also detect what kind of monitor you’re using – the famous Plug’n’Play routine. If your monitor is a true Plug’n’Play monitor, then, again, Windows will either know about, or will ask for a driver (which is actually just a set of parameters that describes what the monitor is capable of). The driver will inform Windows exactly what resolutions the monitor can handle – and at what refresh rates – and what colour depths it can handle at different resolutions and refresh rates. Still, however, Windows will not change resolutions automatically. Neither will it increase the colour depth. Both of these things are under your control, and you have to instruct Windows to do it. Monitor types and resolutions Even if your monitor is not Plug’n’Play, and is not detected by Windows, you can still tell Windows what it’s capable of. Check the documentation that came with it, and you’ll soon see its maximum resolution – that’s what Windows needs to know. In the Windows Device Driver Wizard (which you get to by right clicking on your desktop, selecting Properties, then the Settings tab, followed by Advanced and, finally, Monitor and Change) you can choose the type of monitor you have from a selection of standard types as you can see in the illustration. There are some caveats here, though, and they’re to do with what a reasonable resolution for different monitor sizes is – here’s a set of guidelines
Next time, I'll be looking at how to change resolutions and colour depths quickly and easily, and touch on refresh rates, and why you might want to change them. Other parts of this series
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Unless
you tell Windows differently, it will carry on assuming that, at
least until it detects an adapter that it knows about. At that point
in time, Windows searches its database of graphics card types and
will install a driver, if it has one, or will ask you for a driver,
if it hasn’t. Inevitably, it’s at this point that windows
increases the colour depth to 256 colours, but it won’t
automatically increase the resolution. Why? The monitor.
