Lower rez or diminished effects with higher rez

It's even worse with a (decent) flat-panel. Anti-aliasing is pretty much essential.

 

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Thats what I try and do (commerical reality rarely gives me that much freedom ). I try and get everything except the 'special' stuff working at 1024x768 on a high-end video, have a few 'special' features for next-gen cards (they can also use AA, higher res) and make sure it runs well at 640x480 for those with crap video cards.

My research is stuck at 640x480 at the moment but as research its meant to be slow

 

Just to throw in my $0.02...

I'm in agreement with the 1024x768 minimum crowd. Based on my own monitor size (19"), that's really the lowest resolution I will "tolerate". I will turn off features (including AA if need be), in order to get playable at that resolution.

At that point, it's really just subjective, and it depends entirely on the feature itself on whether or not I'd rather go higher than 1024, or stay at 1024 with the feature.

 

i supose i should add that after 800x600 comes all the eyecandy in the game but then i will increase the resolution to at least 1024x768 before applying any aa or af. acutaly 1152x864 is the point the pixels stop standing out on my 21" and i will sacrifce a little aa and af for that resolution or better if i have the headroom avalable.

 

i don't find 'jaggies' particularly acceptable at any res in this day and age
with a decent AA with support for alpha textures that had no performance impact in itself, turning down even as low as 640x480 would be a preferred solution to switching off any fx in my book
as was said by others previously, my next monitor won't be so large as to enable me to use resolutions that my next gfx card won't be able to perform at

 

I like to have roughly enough computer "power" to run current games at 800X600 with 4XFSAA and 8XAF. As things slow down and games advance, I tend to begin upgrading my system bottlenecks.