Common Screen Resolutions?

Query the display driver to obtain all the resolutions it supports. Never use a hardcoded list or people of the future won't be able to play your game at their native resolution

I can only second what Bacterius said - there are so many classic games that had hard-coded resolution lists and that don't work right (or just break completely) on modern hardware. You can't even rely on common aspect ratios, so query the display driver, lay out your 2D stuff in some manner that will be more robust at various resolutions/aspect ratios, and include support for widescreen resolutions when setting the FOV for your 3D stuff.

Also echoing the "support the native resolution" look at the steam hardware survey. Take note how random the resolutions are. Basically everyone just buys random monitors without thinking about it most of the time so supporting everything is key. At the very least support 1920x1080 which is quickly taking over as the dominant resolution.

It depends on the target market -- for the Hardcore and enthusiast gamer, the steam survey is a fine data point. For Casual games, you want something with a breader base. The Building Windows 8 blog posted stats based on Windows 7 users, that showed that the most common resolution is 1366x768 (almost 50%, and 2.5x higher than the next nearest resolution--1280x800), owing in large part to the recent explosion in laptop sales and 1366x768s near-domination of the laptop market.

I agree its best not to hard-code the resolution list, but it does still inform your art-direction, in 2D, raster-graphics games especially, but even in 3D games too.

My new iPad has a resolution of 2048x1536. My desktop monitor is 1920x1080. Even my cell phone and netbook have higher resolution than 800x600.

An 800x600 game looks really crappy on any of the above, so don't do it. Either make your graphics resolution independent (for example, using vector graphics), or ship multiple versions of the game assets for different resolutions.

Also, keep in mind that every single display I described above has a different aspect ratio. Fixed resolutions just don't work in today's world.

Hello,
Well I am in need of a list or some opinions regarding the most common screen resolutions that I can include in as an option to players. I currently plan to have 800x600 but this is obviously very limiting to those of us with larger resolutions.

Forgive me if this is in the wrong section, I wasn't entirely sure where it belonged.

Looking at your journal entry, your starting screen looks really hi-detailed (and btw very good), therefore a retro look is out of question. The targeted screen resolution depends on some important factors:

1. Is it a web game/mobile game ?
In this case lower resolutions are acceptable, it is unlikely that you play a web game in full screen mode ,isn't it ?

2. Is it a 2d game ?
Well.. this is hard. a clever upscale algorithm could solve some of the more annoying problems, but 800x600 would be very low. Best to choose a higher resoluation (i.e. 720p) and scale the results down/up.

3. Is it a 3d game ?
Well, this shouldn't be a problem, thought a fixed 2d gui would result in similar problems as already described in 2.
Best to either scale-up your gui elements (could get ugly really fast, depends heavily on art assets) or make separate gui blocks and dock them into your game independently of the screen resolution.

Hmm, well the main reason I asked was due to the background image in my menu not scaling too well when you reach higher resolutions, so I think my best bet is to have the menu itself have a set resolutions (within the screen) and have it choose the best based on your selected resolution, then surround the remaining with black, the game itself however will be able to cover your whole screen just fine, that sound just enough? or should I perhaps work at a different angle?

Hmm, well the main reason I asked was due to the background image in my menu not scaling too well when you reach higher resolutions, so I think my best bet is to have the menu itself have a set resolutions (within the screen) and have it choose the best based on your selected resolution, then surround the remaining with black, the game itself however will be able to cover your whole screen just fine, that sound just enough? or should I perhaps work at a different angle?

IMO forcing a low resolution isn't a viable solution to your problem, you might as well scale the background image in that case.

Actually it is as it isn't as low as it myth sound and in any an case I'm not resizing an image to the point it's destroyed. As fr as viable it is Indeed, the image is nOrmally 1024x1450 that gives me Plenty of to resize while still limiting larger resolutions

How about making your background image twice the resolution that you're targetting? -- scale down by half for the "typical" resolution, but for higher resolutions there will still be enough image detail that it won't look bad (In general, up-scaling looks bad because it "guesses" pixels that aren't really there, but down-scaling looks fine because it's just re-sampling pixels that really are there.)

Doubling the resolution in both x and y is 4x as many pixels, but with compression will maybe be around just twice as large on disk than the smaller version (depending on the type of compression used).