Do games with low resolutions have better performance?

[joannesalfa]

I was wondering if we develop HTML5 game with low resolution such as 160 x 240, 320 x 480, etc. would bring good performance due to drawing process.

 

Is that true?

[soybean]

I find this rather true by experience. Lower resolution games have better FPS. I think this is due to browser renderer. Providing which does it work best. Some are excellent with canvas2d, while others not but good with webgl. CMIIW.

[Solidus]

I've done 960x640 and the performance is still fine.  But the games are not large and do not do anything very intensive.

[gobbogoes]

definitely!

[tyson]

I've had good success with using 480x320 as a base, and dropping down to 240x160 for Android ICS and below.  Anything above that just isn't playable especially on Samsung devices.

 

Having different resolution assets loaded depending on certain conditions is pretty easy if its supported in the game engine or asset loader.

[Lachsen]

I think it really does depend a lot on the hardware.

On modern desktops and laptops it won't make a very big difference, since rendering with HTML5 (canvas2D or WebGL) are all hardware accelerated and if there is one thing modern graphics cards can do well it's processing of massive pixels in parallel.

That might be less true for mobile devices, though from what I heard, GPUs on these device are also quite capable.

I think what is more critical than resolution is the actual amount of objects you draws, e.g. the amount of draw actions you perform each frame.

For our game, we actually continuously increased the resolution, without any major drop in performance. We started at about 480x320 and are currently at 568x320 (16:9 resolution).

However, until recently, we scaled up all images twice per dimension for blocky pixels (something done in impact.js), so the resolution was actually 1136 x 640.

Just recently we finally got around to enable to use the imageSmoothingEnabled feature of canvas 2D (deaktivating it for sharp pixels), so we could got down to a quarter of the resolution.

And did it improve the performance? Not really. At least not on Chrome on desktop/laptop. But it still saves memory.

In the end, you should consider the target devices when choosing the resolution. However I think HTML5 is capable to support games with higher resolution.

Another thing to consider is that games with lower resolution tend to be easier to produce since graphics (especially sprite art) are less tedious to create.

[joannesalfa]

Thanks for posting here!

 

It totally depends on rendering, if we had a small resolution, it would render faster, otherwise some logic mechanic would consume like physics it will not improve performance using small resolution, but it's only for rendering.

[Ezelia]

lower resolution = less pixels to render = faster rendering