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Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

If you simply goto display properties, you are only changing your screen resolution for your desktop and not 3D games.

Every game has built in graphics settings and then there are more that you can tweak in your graphics card drivers such as Nvidia Control Panel and Catalyst Control Centre if you have Nvidia and ATI cards but there are also other 3rd party programs such as Rivatuner, ntune, ATI Tray Tools, etc. plus many games often have custom settings you can change in the console or ini or cfg files as well. If you need further speed, the video card drivers usually have some additional graphics tweaks and optimizations such as mip map level and hardware texture levels. If a little extra power is needed, overclocking can be done. Some graphics card have built in overclocking options.

Unless you absolutely need to, you do not want to be turning down the resolution in Starcraft 2 or really any game (which would be in the in-game settings), you want to keep the display resolution at the native resolution of your LCD monitor, otherwise it will interpolate and scale itself and you will get a blurry image. If scaling is off, then you will get a smaller image with black borders around it.

What you most likely would be doing in most games is changing the DirectX level, texture resolution, model complexity, effects details, shader level, particle detail, lighting effects, ansiotrophic filtering, and anti-aliasing, etc. before you touch the game resolution.

Starcraft 2 should not be overly taxing and should scale well to a lot of hardware and you should only need to tweak a few in-game settings in the in-game options. The most important thing is your graphics card for handling the game but some CPU power will be needed with heavy unit counts.

That's what I figured, I rarely and I mean rarely game on the computer (I use the 360 or PS3), and I have never played really hardcore games, only Diablo 2 and AoE3.