Say you load up a game and want to play at a lower resolution than what is native for your LCD. Do all modern video cards/drivers allow you to center the image, or is this a feature that must be present in your monitor? Is this some sort of "scaling" that occurs in the monitor, and thus potentially causes input lag?
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Centered, non-native resolution output depends on LCD or video card?
- Thread starter ogewo
- Start date
Many modern monitors can do it themselves (not all though, you have to check each monitor) however the video card drivers can do it also, which is usually the better way to do it, because the scalers built in to monitors are generally crapper than the ones in the graphics drivers.
You have to use a DVI cable to connect the monitor or the option wont appear in your driver's control panel.
You have to use a DVI cable to connect the monitor or the option wont appear in your driver's control panel.
mike_j_johnson
Gawd
- Joined
- Nov 13, 2004
- Messages
- 961
I wasnt able to do it properly with an nVIDIA card until I bought the NEC 2490 and found out that disabling HDCP on the monitor fixes the issue. With HDCP on, the nVIDIA control panel will not allow you to disable scaling (the setting will not stick).
...at least this has been my experience. Also, I flash my video card BIOS turning on a setting called "Non-Native Panel Control". This is the only way I have found out to correct the problem of the boot screen scaling.
Laptops do not seem to have these problems at all since they usually have a way to disable scaling completely via the motherboard BIOS.
...at least this has been my experience. Also, I flash my video card BIOS turning on a setting called "Non-Native Panel Control". This is the only way I have found out to correct the problem of the boot screen scaling.
Laptops do not seem to have these problems at all since they usually have a way to disable scaling completely via the motherboard BIOS.
nVidia drivers also have the ability to insert the black bars around your non native image if your monitor doesn't support it displaying non native images without stretching them.
For example... if your monitor was a 1440x900 and you wanted to play a 1024x768 game. At the driver level, the driver would take that 1024x768 image and insert black borders around it and send it to the monitor at 1440x900.
ATI drivers might do this as well, they didn't back when I had an ATI card in the X800 days though.
For example... if your monitor was a 1440x900 and you wanted to play a 1024x768 game. At the driver level, the driver would take that 1024x768 image and insert black borders around it and send it to the monitor at 1440x900.
ATI drivers might do this as well, they didn't back when I had an ATI card in the X800 days though.
mike_j_johnson
Gawd
- Joined
- Nov 13, 2004
- Messages
- 961
As mentioned the problem on the NVIDIA side is HDCP... the drivers won't let you use GPU scaling with HDCP enabled. There is a registry tweak on the Nvidia forums to disable/enable HDCP.
ooh! Would love to know this tweak since the nVIDIA Windows 7 RC driver is having issues....I can no longer get the "no scaling" setting to stick (even when disabling HDCP on my monitor itself).
Here's a bit of info on this topic:
http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/wiki/index.php/Gaming_with_Blackbars_(Pillarboxing)
That site looks like a great resource for this sort of thing in general.
http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/wiki/index.php/Gaming_with_Blackbars_(Pillarboxing)
That site looks like a great resource for this sort of thing in general.