SebHoll: My desktop is 1920x1200. Not all games I run are capable of maintaining a playable framerate at that resolution.
This same logic applies to those running built-in graphics. They may have their desktop at 1280x1024 (quite common) but this may be a 32MB graphics card. Double-buffer a 1280x1024 32bpp screen and you're using 10MB of that already. It may also be that the 32MB isn't dedicated RAM, but grabbed from system RAM, meaning very slow accesses.
800x600x32 uses just 3.66MB. Also, redrawing the screen involves just 480K pixels, rather than 1.3M pixels, reducing the computation requirements by almost 2.75 times! This could easily translate to a framerate increase of the same amount.
Granted, a lot of hardware would cope very easily with a 2D game at 1280x1024. Problem is, we seem to be discussing a target market which has very old hardware, or without proper drivers.
This same logic applies to those running built-in graphics. They may have their desktop at 1280x1024 (quite common) but this may be a 32MB graphics card. Double-buffer a 1280x1024 32bpp screen and you're using 10MB of that already. It may also be that the 32MB isn't dedicated RAM, but grabbed from system RAM, meaning very slow accesses.
800x600x32 uses just 3.66MB. Also, redrawing the screen involves just 480K pixels, rather than 1.3M pixels, reducing the computation requirements by almost 2.75 times! This could easily translate to a framerate increase of the same amount.
Granted, a lot of hardware would cope very easily with a 2D game at 1280x1024. Problem is, we seem to be discussing a target market which has very old hardware, or without proper drivers.