I refuse to play games that have to run at 800x600. It's absurd that these days, I should have 800x600 as my maximum choice for a resolution in any game, casual or not.
The rest of the graphics do not use more memory. Not in BlitzMax anyway, since you're using hardware acceleration and your texture (that's what your images are- textures) will most likely either be loaded at the resolution you saved it at and at times scaled to an appropriate power of two. In the case of BlitzMax, the textures take up the same space regardless of resolution.
If your game is dependent on a specific resolution or aspect ratio, then congratulations, you're a terrible programmer.
2) Also more VRAM is required to populate a 1024x768 screen (approx 3Mb instead of 2Mb) and any graphics you place on it will all be relatively larger and take up more VRAM and many many systems still have only 32MB VRAM which you can fill up in no time at 800x600 and it would fill up 50+% faster at 1024x768. Sure, you can use more than 32Mb of graphics but then you'll be swapping it in and out of VRAM all the time which will have a performance hit.
This is incorrect, and I really hate that you're pretending to know what you're talking about here. The only thing that will take up more memory with increased resolution are the buffers you draw to.The rest of the graphics do not use more memory. Not in BlitzMax anyway, since you're using hardware acceleration and your texture (that's what your images are- textures) will most likely either be loaded at the resolution you saved it at and at times scaled to an appropriate power of two. In the case of BlitzMax, the textures take up the same space regardless of resolution.
If your game is dependent on a specific resolution or aspect ratio, then congratulations, you're a terrible programmer.