Originally Posted by jmccaskey
Here is the full story on resolution support.
1080p (16:9) is our directly targeted resolution, as that's the best resolution most HDTVs support. You'll have 720p and 1080p as options in the settings UI, 720p is desirable if your GPU is lower end and doesn't have enough bandwidth to push drawing multiple layers of alpha blended 1080p images on top of each other each frame (as occurs in some of our UI). 720p is also obviously desirable in the event that your TV only supports it.
If you are running on a PC Monitor rather than a HDTV then the default will be to render internally at 1080p and then scale/letterbox to fit whatever resolution and aspect ratio your desktop is set to. If you set to 720p the same will happen.
There is a hidden command line parameter -fulldesktopres, this let's you tell us to render natively at your desktop resolution, so if you are 2560x1600 we'll actually create our render targets that size. Because some of our assets (movies, alpha masks, background images) are authored in 1080p they'll be scaled up (preserving aspect ratio), but your fonts will render at your full resolution and will look super crisp. You'll still get black bars if your aspect ratio doesn't match 16:9, because we haven't put in the time to actually re-layout and utilize space correctly in other aspect ratios (it's hard to design UI that sizes to different aspects vs fixed aspect).
Big Picture runs in a border-less D3D10 window in all these cases, borderless has some minor performance tradeoffs but is crucial to avoid bad resizing/flickering cases when launching into fullscreen d3d games. You can use another hidden (for now at least) command line option -windowed to make the UI run in a normal window that isn't full screen if your desktop resolution is larger than the Big Picture resolution.
