Widescreen gaming

Æthelred

'lo,
I'm looking at getting a widescreen monitior for the first time and only just twigged that games might be a problem.. Do new games in general have proper widescreen modes? Or will I be stuck with black-bars or worse, stretched visuals?

Noray

Pretty much any game made in the last few years supports widescreen resolutions. If they don't, most monitors will give you black bars or you can set pixel ratio to 1:1 so the graphics don't get stretched. Just don't get a Samsung Syncmaster 931BW, because it stretches stuff out and doesn't know how to scale. It's pretty bad. I had to get this one from all the Samsungs available, the rest are apparently fine.

My brother has this one http://www.b4udirect.com/index.cfm?course=/home/product/00040028/SAMSUNG&bhjs=-1

a TV and monitor in one, 20", and it looks pretty nice

Aldo

New games shouldn't be a problem, most older games can be played windowed.

You will notice a drop in performance, though. My dad bought a widescreen for ~200eu so he could have prettier graphics on WoW (he's an idiot) but he had to set all his settings from high to medium to be able to play the game normally. It shouldn't be as big a problem with newer PCs.

lordrel

I have one of those 24 inch Dells and love it. It's native res is 1920x1200

Like said, many new games support such resolutions. WoW looks great, and I love having that much room for my UI. NWN2 supports that resolution, but I found much of the text too small at that resolution (though the game looked great). I tried editing the UI some, but eventually just scaled back the res. Still looked fine.
Even if the game doesn't support widescreen res, most of the time any of the high res options look fine to me.
The only time I really notice any stretching is using games that run at like 640x480 and below. Fallout looks a little weird.....

You may have to scale back the res also depending on the game and the horsepower of your vid card.

vonPoonBurGer

I've been gaming at 1680x1050 for a couple of years now. Almost all recent games support that resolution natively these days. The last game I played that didn't was Battlefield 2, and the scaling on my monitor (Dell 2005FPW) didn't bother me at all. Just remember, if you plan on playing games at the native resolution on a widescreen monitor, chances are your video card will need to do significantly more work per frame. Prior to getting the widescreen monitor, I usually gamed at 1280x1024. Running at 1680x1050 is ~35% more pixels that the video card needs to generate in each frame, which is more or less 35% more work it has to do. If you make a transition like mine and you're not getting 50+ FPS in the games you currently play, moving up to the native resolution of a widescreen LCD will probably drop you under that magic 30 FPS threshold, and frame rate chop will be noticeable. I'm very happy with the LCD, and I'd recommend a modern flat panel to any gamer these days, but the native resolution issue is something to keep in mind when figuring out whether your video card is up to snuff.

Noray

vonPoonBurGer wrote: »

I've been gaming at 1680x1050 for a couple of years now. Almost all recent games support that resolution natively these days. The last game I played that didn't was Battlefield 2, and the scaling on my monitor (Dell 2005FPW) didn't bother me at all. Just remember, if you plan on playing games at the native resolution on a widescreen monitor, chances are your video card will need to do significantly more work per frame. Prior to getting the widescreen monitor, I usually gamed at 1280x1024. Running at 1680x1050 is ~35% more pixels that the video card needs to generate in each frame, which is more or less 35% more work it has to do. If you make a transition like mine and you're not getting 50+ FPS in the games you currently play, moving up to the native resolution of a widescreen LCD will probably drop you under that magic 30 FPS threshold, and frame rate chop will be noticeable. I'm very happy with the LCD, and I'd recommend a modern flat panel to any gamer these days, but the native resolution issue is something to keep in mind when figuring out whether your video card is up to snuff.

Definitely, the increase in resolution is something to take into account. For console gaming, you can't go wrong with a widescreen, the bigger the better, but for a PC, you have to take your video card into account.

Deathwing

I just picked up a Viewsonic 22" widescreen last week (replacing a Viewsonic 19" LCD), and it's been great so far. At the moment i've tried Guild Wars, the whole Orange Box, Galactic Civilizations 2, and Worms Armageddon, and everything has worked perfectly. Playing DVDs looks great as well.

but the native resolution issue is something to keep in mind when figuring out whether your video card is up to snuff.

I haven't really had a problem with this, since I switched from a 7600GS to an 8600GT card at the same time I swapped monitors, but definately a good point to remember.

Orogogus

Widescreen Gaming Forums is pretty much the go-to resource for this subject.

vonPoonBurGer

Orogogus wrote: »

Widescreen Gaming Forums is pretty much the go-to resource for this subject.

Some of the folks on that forum are too hardcore for me, I gotta say. I'm just happy if the game works at 1680x1050, but many of the WGF people want to know whether the widescreen FOV is expanded or cropped as compared to the FOV when running the game at 4:3. The whole "controversy" with BioShock's original widescreen implementation started on the WGF forums, I think. For games that don't support 16:10 out of the box, though, the collection of FOV hacks they have there is pretty super.

Nova_C

I have LG's 19" wide LCD and when I play older games on it they look great (1024x768 on a 1440x900 monitor). The stretching is hardly noticeable and it scales really well. If you don't want that, though, I'm not sure that it'll let you put it back into a 4:3 ratio.

Virtually any game released in the last coupla years will have widescreen resolutions, though, so it shouldn't be a big deal.

Cryogen

I've had a Dell 24" for a couple of years now and i dont even worry about games i buy supporting widescreen, pretty much everything commercial does. On some older, or indie, games they dont support widescreen but to be honest i dont even notice it anymore. I just fire it up, theres black bars either side of the image, and i play the game. Doesnt worry me.

The most important thing to consider though has already been mentioned. You take a performance hit from running at such high resolutions, so make sure your PC is capable. I ended up replacing my videocard to cope, luckily the rest of my computer was already up to scratch.

I must say though that buying a big, widescreen monitor was the single best investment i've ever made in my computer owning life. Its awesome for games and movies obviously, but its also sensational for work due to screen real estate.

Æthelred

Thanks all; I'm not sure whether my graphics card will be able to handle the extra resolution for the newest games, but as long as I can opt for black-bars I'll be okay. Especially since I play a fair few older games; stretched pixels are terrible. When using a TV, I'm the sort to watch DVDs full-screen rather than keep the proper resolution the film-geeks love, so I doubt I'll be fussed with the sort of things the WGF-ites are, however.

saltiness

I've been on a 20" widescreen for about 3 years now and I can't even play on a regular monitor anymore. I feel like I have tunnel vision when I try to use a regular 4:3 now. Widescreen is just that good.