I've previously and jokingly (thought not really a joke) said that 320x240 will be faster by just a few microseconds, but this might prove otherwise that it is faster by frames/seconds.
I've figured since the game's native resolution is 320x240 that background stretching would be a bottleneck on the load times, especially in a resolution that isn't an integer scale (800x600, 1024x768, ...) However, there seems to be identical results even with 640x480 or 1280x960, so a floating point scale may be used in every case except 1.0 (320x240). I hypothesize that 320x200 or 160x120 will be slower than 320x240 because of down scaling.
You can argue that there are FPS dips on my machine during 60 FPS moments, but the screen transition test may prove otherwise.
I've tested all these cases at least 3 times except menu open. It seems opening the menu was faster in 800x600, but it is unknown if the controls have influenced the appearance of "Yes".
What do you think? Is it just my FPS dip or is the game really loading faster in 320x240?
I think all machines will benefit from 320x240 play except some GPUs that don't support 320x240, though the time difference may vary.
My main argument was really that you could gain time since the game doesn't need to stretch the backgrounds during loads which takes a lot of CPU cycles; It seems the game does not let the GPU scale. I didn't think the time difference would be significant, but my tests are saying otherwise.
The test video is kind of unfair since I barely tested against 640x480 and 1280x960, which are nice integer scales that are powers of 2, but of the little testing I did against them I had similar results. I chose 800x600 since it's a floating point scale (2.5) and not an integer. 1024x768 should be even worse (3.2).
I know some games that use multiple resolution backgrounds as on optimization, but I don't think BIO3 would be one as it's an old game. It's possible it has 240p and 480p backgrounds since those were common resolutions at the time, but 240p saves space. I also know some PS1 games that had 480p backgrounds anyway, at least in their ports if they had one.
Anyway, it's just a thought or suggestion if someone wants to save as many frames as possible.
