Widescreen Gaming Forum

well then. based on the pics and recomendations and , well almost every review i could find , i paid dell for the monitor , they say they will be sending it in a few days , so i think i might as well get down to tweaking or something , he he , thanx both for your advice and help

:D now you will see me more often , cause im gonna need lots of feedback and help and friends since im gonna stay all day tweaking the monitor , so have a nice end of year and a better new year to you all (Duke nukem forever , Prey , UT2007,Oblivion!!,hell gate london ) well it should be better for gaming , upgrades coming soon.

can i do sli 7800gtx with a power supply of 450 watts ? just a question , or are you using 500 or 550 ?




:D

Hey Paddy - on those 1440x900 shots....does the game play in full screen once you get past the cut-scenes? If so, what output option are you using in your nvidia output settings?

Hey Paddy - on those 1440x900 shots....does the game play in full screen once you get past the cut-scenes?

Yes

If so, what output option are you using in your nvidia output settings?

Monitor scaling.

Also read

Tweaks: Ultimate Gamer Mother Lode ! ATI/nVidea/Win XP/Games

& the other monitor testing setup tweak tools in our Tweaks section...

They should help a lot.

[quote]Hey Paddy - on those 1440x900 shots....does the game play in full screen once you get past the cut-scenes?

Yes

If so, what output option are you using in your nvidia output settings?

Monitor scaling.

Ah, I see. Thanks for the info. So the image is stretched? How does it look in-game?

... So the image is stretched? How does it look in-game?

Stretched ... ?
No not what we usually call stretched on the forum ... just enlarged to fit the panel. 1440x900 is 16:10 and the Dell 2405 is 16:10.

I think it looks pretty good for non-native ... but I haven't played it very at if ... at all ... at that res ... I just did it to show omegaferrari what it looks like. I play at the native res of the screen 1920x1200.

Now you got me thinking ... :shock:
Games are often described as "stretched" here on the forum and sometimes it gets confusing ...
I'm not having a go ... :D ... your question just got me thinking ...

A 4:3 res shown on a 16:9 screen will look stretched because the sides are stretched out to fit the 16:9 ratio.
Some games that have available 16:9 resolutions sometimes do not have there FOV widened to accommodate the wider screen and so they can also look stretched.

or another way of looking at both of those is that the image is ... squashed down top and bottom to fit the widescreen.

and now ...
"Stretched" can be used to describe a lower non-native res scaled up to fit the screen.

Oooo my head hurts ... :mrgreen:

Oooo my head hurts ...

Hehe....I think I know what you mean. :wink:

I was curious about that myself, because before my Seagate HD's petered out on me, I was playing Fable: The Lost Chapters, and fiddling around with the the different output options. I noticed that if I used monitor scaling, the introduction movies and game menu would fill the whole screen. If I used aspect ratio scaling, the intro movies and game menu would letterbox. Visually, it looked like the monitor scaling was stretching out the intro movies and game menu's, so I switched to aspect ratio scaling in order to view everything more, as I believed, as the developer intended.

In fact, if I used monitor scaling in the past, I wasn't even sure that the 1920x1200 was rendering correctly, so i simply switched to aspect ratio scaling to make sure. That way, if I used 1920x1200, it would guarantee correct rendering, and any other resolution as well (as far as a non-native rez can be, that is :wink:), albeit with black bars on the side.

But in this case, you claim that you are using a 16:10 aspect ratio resolution, which is enlarged rather than stretched. That's actually pretty interesting to me, as I hadn't thought that other non-native resolutions would provide correct FOV (in so much as the game was tailored towards it) and proportions, irregardless of the output being set to monitor scaling.

But I think you're right here....

A 4:3 res shown on a 16:9 screen will look stretched because the sides are stretched out to fit the 16:9 ratio.
Some games that have available 16:9 resolutions sometimes do not have there FOV widened to accommodate the wider screen and so they can also look stretched.

or another way of looking at both of those is that the image is ... squashed down top and bottom to fit the widescreen.

and now ...
"Stretched" can be used to describe a lower non-native res scaled up to fit the screen.

Because in addition to 4:3 resolutions stretching out the sides to fill the screen, and 16:10 or 16:9 games w/out the widened FOV (although some of them have purported 'widescreen' options) we now have lower non-native resolutions, like 1440x900. In this case though - are we talking about the image being "stretched" as in forced to fit the whole screen by expanding, or are we talking about "enlarged" as in a perfectly acceptable 16:10 resolution 'scaling' to fit a larger viewable area? Because technically it is a correct 16:10 aspect ratio, but doesn't some visual quality have to be sacrificed, because the image has to be 'blown up' to a certain degree?

I ask b/c it would actually be pretty cool to be able to use lower resolutions like 1440x900 (as long as it looked good) in other games, sometime down the line, when the concept of diminishing graphical returns mandates lower visual quality in order to get acceptable framerates.

In this case though - are we talking about the image being "stretched" as in forced to fit the whole screen by expanding, or are we talking about "enlarged" as in a perfectly acceptable 16:10 resolution 'scaling' to fit a larger viewable area? Because technically it is a correct 16:10 aspect ratio, but doesn't some visual quality have to be sacrificed, because the image has to be 'blown up' to a certain degree?

In this case we talking about "enlarged" as in a perfectly acceptable 16:10 resolution 'scaling' to fit a larger viewable area

and yes ... some visual quality is sacrificed, because the image has to be 'blown up' to a certain degree.

I ask b/c it would actually be pretty cool to be able to use lower resolutions like 1440x900 (as long as it looked good) in other games, sometime down the line, when the concept of diminishing graphical returns mandates lower visual quality in order to get acceptable framerates.

Yeah ... that's it ... and in my opinion it doesn't look so bad using lower non-native resolutions scaled up in this way.

That's pretty cool. :) I definitely learned something new here. So perhaps in the case of a game like Gun, where the 16:10 resolution is stretched, we could say that using a resolution of 1440x900 on a 20+ 16:10 widescreen monitor both enlarges and stretches the game.

http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=13414&highlight=gun#13414

Yes ... :D

or to be more precise ... sorry ... it's just that my mind is rolling with the flow now ... :mrgreen:

So perhaps in the case of a game like Gun, where the 16:10 resolution has a stretched view, we could say that using a resolution of 1440x900 on a 20+ 16:10 widescreen monitor that has a greater native res than 1440x900 both enlarges the image and stretches the view ... assuming the graphics card and/or the monitor can scale the image.

ohooo ... that mess with my head ... :lol: