Widescreen Gaming Forum

Hi there
Im new to this forum and have a couple of questions. Im contemplating purchasing a 23" widescreen LCD monitor for my PC.

The question I have is, when you resize to fill up your widescreen does it strech the image out? I noticed not alot of games support widescreen gaming but it seems alot of people on here have found ways around that. My concern is that your image is straching to fill out the screen and isnt genuinely a 16:9 image. Thanks in advance.

It all depends on your video settings and the game.

Some games work perfectly and fill the widescreen like Neverwinter Nights, The Sims 2, Doom 3, Half-Life 2, City of Heroes and World of Warcraft.

Some games stretch but cut off the top and bottom, instead of adding to the left and right. Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War and Max Payne 2 are like this.

Some games stretch but it's not that noticeable, like Ghost Master.

Some games stretch and it's quite noticeable. For example, most people notice that Warcraft 3 is stretched.

Now, if you set a game to run at a 4:3 resolution, it may or may not stretch, depending on if your video card and drivers support "fixed asset scaling." This means it will stretch the square to fit your screen height, but won't stretch the width all the way out. You will be left with "veritcal letterboxing," which is black bars on the side.

Yep, pretty much what Ibrin said.

Until someone tries out a game on a widescreen, we don't really know whether it'll work or not. Some of the newer games are happy with widescreen, others aren't.

Some surprisingly old stuff can be got to work with widescreen. All the games that use the Quake 3 Arena engine or the Unreal/Unreal Warfare engine will do widescreen with a couple of tweaks.

However, if you play a lot of older games, weigh the bonuses of widescreen and non-widescreen... :)

Oh, and nVidia seems to treat non-widescreen games on widescreen panels better than ATi... although that may have changed with the X800 range. Graphics card, monitor and the game all have an effect on how a game does widescreen.

Thanks for the responses. Well I have an ATI 9800XT and have been looking at the Apple Cinema 23" LCD, since it now is PC compatible.

I have an HDTV widescrren television and notice the screen streches the image if its 4:3 native.

From reading the posts here and people that have found widescreen support for games with tweaks makes me wonder if this is truely widecreen or is it just the image streched out to fill out the screen? Thanks in advance.

From reading the posts here and people that have found widescreen support for games with tweaks makes me wonder if this is truely widecreen or is it just the image streched out to fill out the screen? Thanks in advance.

It depends on the game. Completely.

You can make a game appear 'pixel perfect' on the screen by editing the res: eg: Quake 3 on a 1680x1050 panel at 1680x1050. You can make it appear at the right aspect ratio by changing the Field of View: eg: normal FOV=90 on a 4:3 ratio screen, therefore on a 16:10 screen, you want an FOV of 100 or so...

Thats about all you can do.

Some games have good widescreen support, some have bad. That's the way it's going to be for a long time, I think.