"Standard" Resolution Performance

Tyler Camp · 2013-07-31T02:09:39

One of my professors has made the claim that using a "standard" resolution (i.e. 1920x1080, 1024x768, etc.) will provide better performance than using "non-standard" resolution (1500x755, etc.) I've never heard of this before and can't seem to find anything to back his claims. I know a lot of games on consoles render to lower (and "non-standard") resolutions and then upscale for better performance, which is the opposite of what he's stated. I don't know what he really means by "resolution" and he hasn't clarified. (The display resolution? The resolution of any framebuffer that is being rendered to?) He didn't say that this was specifically for any platform, but I was in an XNA on Windows class at the time. I've tried benchmarking it myself (basic 2D sprite rendering via XNA, fullscreen with different backbuffer resolutions) and didn't see any performance penalties/gains that were out of the ordinary. Asking him about it just got the response of "well, it only happens for more advanced graphics algorithms." Has anyone else heard anything like this?