Letterbox with nVidia Drivers

TychoCelchuuu

Not once in my life have I ever gotten letterboxing to work right. Let's say I'm running something at 1280x720 on my 1280x1024 screen; I don't want the thing scaled up vertically, I just want black bars.

My nVidia control panel has at least one option that appears to do this:



But it doesn't. In fact none of those options do this. I don't think my monitor has the ability built in (SyncMaster 930b).

Halp? Is this even possible?

Raekreu

So you're saying that you just want the 'black bars' on the top and the bottom of the screen as per letterbox style films, right?

TychoCelchuuu

Yes. I don't want the image stretched, or if possible I don't want the image stretched in a way that does not maintain its aspect ratio. Uniform scaling is fine.

Raekreu

Ok, the way to do this with the driver options on an Nvidia card is to set the resolution as you described (1280x720 on your native 1280x1024 monitor) and then under the driver options select the 'do not scale' feature. The image will display unstretched/unscaled leaving the top and the bottom black-barred.

I wouldn't do this all the time, though - you can get image burn-in if you leave it alone for long enough. Though I think you'd have to be actively trying to mess it up for that to happen.

TychoCelchuuu

So it only works if the entire computer's resolution changes? I was talking about a game running full screen at 1280x720 for instance.

Raekreu

TychoCelchuuu wrote: »

So it only works if the entire computer's resolution changes? I was talking about a game running full screen at 1280x720 for instance.

Well, you can leave the desktop resolution at the native and just set the game to the lower resolution.

TychoCelchuuu

Raekreu wrote: »

TychoCelchuuu wrote: »

So it only works if the entire computer's resolution changes? I was talking about a game running full screen at 1280x720 for instance.

Well, you can leave the desktop resolution at the native and just set the game to the lower resolution.

But that doesn't do it. The game just stretches.

Raekreu

TychoCelchuuu wrote: »

Raekreu wrote: »

TychoCelchuuu wrote: »

So it only works if the entire computer's resolution changes? I was talking about a game running full screen at 1280x720 for instance.

Well, you can leave the desktop resolution at the native and just set the game to the lower resolution.

But that doesn't do it. The game just stretches.

Did you set the driver to do not scale? I never had any issue getting this to work for me.

TychoCelchuuu

Yeah it's set to no scale, the 4th option in the screencap I posted.

Raekreu

That is all that I had to do with mine. Once that option is selected, I'd just change the game's resolution to 1280x720 and it would display as unscaled and unstretched widescreen. I think I may have had the same monitor, too - it was a Samsung sncymaster with a native resolution of 1280x1024.

TychoCelchuuu

Whyyyyy

Raekreu

Oh, wait...lurking the interwebs found some answers that you aren't going to like. Seems to be a driver issue that got introduced a couple of iterations ago. None of the scaling options work anymore, they just default to scaling with the monitor's built in options.

UPDATE: looks like it's the windows XP version of the drivers that are buggered. Plus scaling apparently won't work if you're using a VGA cable instead of a DVI cable.

TychoCelchuuu

Well I'm on Windows 7 with a DVI cable so that's fantastic. I'm not sure why nVidia would bother including 4 options that all do the same thing. They're taunting me!

Elimination

This used to work for me on XP, but now with Win 7 it no longer works.

saltiness

Doesn't your monitor let you control this? My Dell monitor has settings for scaling.

dobi

I've had versions of NVIDIA drivers where this feature just plain didn't work. I'd try looking around for another version on the internet and seeing if that one works, because it should be working. In fact, it's working on my Win 7 x64 laptop.

Not sure if you have a laptop or not, but I normally get all of my drivers from laptopvideo2go.com. They have modified .INF files that let you install any NVIDIA driver on any specific GPU chipset.

Drez

Nvidia's drivers are temperamental. Dude, I recommend just installing a bunch of different driver versions until you find one that works.

I had an even odder situation: My MONITOR has scaling, but Win7 Nvidia drivers was OVERRIDING that and stretching. I couldn't turn that shit off. But then I updated my drivers and that got fixed.

Very annoying though.