That’s fine. But I’m simply suggesting not wasting time auto-magically choosing settings that most user will override anyway. Features like this have approaching zero added value. I’d only do something like this if I had some engineer sitting idle without something more profitable to work on.
Oh I think you’re wrong there, we try to find the best screen solution and obviously start fullscreen.
I’m pretty sure normal users dont ever touch graphic options - they dont even know what it all means - at best they know what a screen solution is.
obviously talking about quite the wii crowd of people, but better be on the safe side and have the game start up by default as best as possible
This is indeed an issue for game developers and many games will run micro-benchmarks at start-up to determine feature support and auto-tune rendering parameters. Khronos has recognized this inconvenience and has just released ARB_internalformat_query2 (in GL4.3 core, the extension is implementable on GL2.0+ hardware). It’s a first step that covers textures and FBO rendering and allows the developer to easily determine feature support and avoid sub-optimal paths (see the CAVEAT_SUPPORT response).
I personally use a few benchmarks to determine hardware details without resorting to vendor-specific libraries. It’s a bit of a pain to tune them properly and sensitivity to unpredictable events from the environment is an issue, but some of them work great and complete in a few milliseconds. For example, CPU cache line size and GPU warp/wavefront size detection. The latter is not only important for performance reasons, but for algorithmic correctness as well.
Personally I consider load balancing via variable rendering quality to be a different issue.