Wide or Not?

Right now I'm sitting with a Viewsonic VP171b that's around 1-3 years old. I'm buying a new computer and I think I might grab a new LCD to go with it. My question is how good are widescreens? Any resolution problems with games? Do they generally have less response time than 4:3 or other "square" displays?

And on that topic, what brands and models could be recommended? Kind of debating whether or not to camp out for Black Friday or just snag a good deal online and I'd like to nail down what monitor to look for


Muchos thanks
GF

Well having just got a widescreen, I have to say they rule. Widescreen gaming just rocks. That said, you are going to run in to compatibility problems with some games. I decided on a 1920x1200 display for that reason in part. If the game doesnt support widescreen, well that means it can do 4:3 1600x1200. However on games that support the widescreen, it's really damn cool.

I don't find that response time is a problem, if there's ghosting, I don't notice it, same for lag.

All in all I love it for gaming.

In particular I opted for a BenQ FP241W

I own several 24" dell 2405fpw monitors, and two sceptre 20.4" wide screens. I will never go back.

So if you end up running games in a different aspect ratio do they end up being swished or does it put bars on the sides or what? How distracting is it?

Depends. On the particular monitor I got it scales everything to full screen, so it's up to my graphics card. I opted to have it scale everything aspect ratio correct. So everything is scaled to the largest size it can be while still being the right aspect ratio.

That means if I play a 4:3 game there's a vertical black bar on the left and right of the screen. Doesn't bother me a bit, the screen is huge. It's still like a 21" screen in 4:3 mode or so.

You have to remember that another way of expressing 16:10 would be 8:5 and another way of expressing 4:3 would be 8:6. They are actually not a major aspect ratio difference. A 4:3 screen is 1600x1200, a 16:10 screen is 1920x1200. So when you run a game in 4:3 mode you lose only 160 pixels width off of each side of the screen.

However I find that when a game is widescreen, it's very enveloping. After all our vision is wider than it is high. Having the extra area just makes it more enthralling.

The thing to consider for gaming and specifically 4:3 gaming are that to the maximum extent possible, you want to run an LCD at its native resolution. While I find that the scaling the nVidia does is pretty good, especially with a high rez display, running native is best. This means two things:

1) Try and have a card that can handle the full widescreen rez at a reasonable speed. Don't go getting a 1920x1200 display with a 9600 Pro or something. What works depends on the games you play. For example I have a 7800GT. WoW, Battlefronts 2, Civ 4, all run great at 1920x1200. Oblivion, not so much, I have to run it lower rez.

2) Consider what the rez in 4:3 mode will be and if games will support that. That's one of the reasons I looked at a 1920x1200 display, it works out nicely to 1600x1200 in 4:3 mode. However a 1680x1050 display works out to 1400x1050 which isn't so common.

Also consider that comparing a widescreen to a fullscreen in size means making allowances for the wider ratio. A 24" widescreen is the same vertical size roughly as a 21.3" fullscreen.

lol you want to know a little secret?

I've got a 21" dell monitor, not widescreen.

If I want to make it "look" like a widescreen I just resize all of my internet, word processing windows, etc. into rectangular boxes lol.

A 19" wide screen is not as tall as a normal 19" screen.

How about something good in the $300-375 range?