Assuming you can't play at highest settings in your games...

Do you tend to play at higher resolutions with lowered eye candy or the reverse where you have more eye candy, but lower resolution?

higher resolution with lowered eye candy.

lower resolution with "more eye candy" is somewhat of an oxymoron.

I care more for the image quality than the res. So if I have to. I lower the res slightly, and max out the eye candy.

So I'm a oxymoron lol.

The first thing I do in a new game is set it to the max resolution that monitor can handle (1280x1024) and then go from their with the image quality, AA, AF etc.

Originally Posted by Bobaroo

The first thing I do in a new game is set it to the max resolution that monitor can handle (1280x1024) and then go from their with the image quality, AA, AF etc.

I'm used to doing the same.

Depends on the game. Some of them I hack to lower settings than the options menu lets you go, others I do the reverse to.

I tend to lean toward higher resolution and lower texture detail.

With a 512 MB video card, though, resolution is never a question.

Yeah, I rarely see any kind of increase in performance when lowering the res, it usually just looks bad. Specifically when running an LCD monitor that is designed to run best at a specified res.

That's an important point. Running anything outside of an LCD's native resolution is going to look like pure crap.

There are some exceptions.

Originally Posted by Gunslinger

I tend to lean toward higher resolution and lower texture detail.

With a 512 MB video card, though, resolution is never a question.

But what about if the graphics card is powerful with 512MB but the cpu is rather slow? (like in my case: 2.8ghz P4) Is it enough?

Your CPU isn't going to limit resolution, just all the extra bells and whistles.