Does the game know my screen resolution?

[Peter34]

A couple of days ago, I watched some youtube videos of Factorio, and to ginormous my surprise they looked prettier at 720p than actual gameplay does on my 1600x1200 monitor. Usually it's the other way around, with youtube vids pretty damn ugly, because of compression and so forth, and of course 720 pixels height being rather a lot less than 1200 (even 1080 is less than 1200, although at that point I'd expect it not to be noticable).



I looked at graphic options, to see if there was anything I could tune up, but there wasn't (maybe that bitmap thingie, but I kinda doubt it - not that I know what it does, or whether increasing it is good or bad). But I noticed very early on that the game config interface didn't have a screen resolution chooser.

Initially I just assumed it was because the game automagically "knew" my screen rez. After all, this is 2014 and I'm running Windows 7. It's reasonble to expect Bill Gates to take care of that by now.

Then again, on 2nd thought... Maybe the game is running in a default rez, 1280x1024 or something like that, and that's why the graphics are less impressive than one would expect.

How do I check this? Or is it a non-issue?

[Boogieman14]

I haven't actually checked, but I believe for me the game runs at the screen's native resolution. Many flatpanels have an information display that will show the resolution it's receiving, that might provide some information.

[Peter34]

I haven't actually checked, but I believe for me the game runs at the screen's native resolution. Many flatpanels have an information display that will show the resolution it's receiving, that might provide some information.

I don't think mine has such an information display.

What does the "bitmap" thingie do, in graphics settings? That could be it,I'm thinking. But I have no clue at all what it does, and whether it is good or bad to increase to decrease it.

[FishSandwich]

According to the changelog it's to do with memory caching, if you have a fairly decent computer it's safe(and advisable) to just go ahead and leave that disabled.

Looking through the graphic settings I can only really see two settings that would increase quality, and that's multisampling and the light render quality. If you have those set to high already, then I'm not really sure what the problem could be.

[Peter34]

If you have those set to high already, then I'm not really sure what the problem could be.

That's why I'm thinking that there's some game config file, somewhere, that says 1280x960 or 1024x768, or something like that, in spite of my screen being 1600x1200, and resulting in things looking like crap because a flatscreen, as opposed to a CRT screen, only works well when displaying its native resolution (or an interger multiplier of it, e.g. I know of no reason why my 1600x1200 screen shouldn't be able to display exactly 800x600 or exactly 400x300 just fine).

So my question is the same as it was in the original post:
How do I find out what resolution the game is running in, or thinks it should be running in?

[SilverWarior]

Factorio runs in the same resolution as your desktop is. Unlike many other games it wasn't optimized for specific resolutions (predefined resolution specific UI, etc).

The only reason for Factorio looking worse on your computer than on some Youtube video that I can think of is for game to automaticaly fallback to low graphic mode.
This could happen if your graphics card doesen't have suficient amount of Video memory available. Unmoded vanila game already requires over 256 MB of video memory. But moded game quickly exceeds 512 MB of Video memory requirement.
Also do note that having larger resolution will increase Video memory requirement even further due to special sceene chaching system that the game uses in order to avoid to have to rerender the whole sceene from the start.

[cube]

Factorio always runs at native resolution. What you see sounds like an effect of the low graphics quality in graphics settings.