Do most games support WSXGA? And what if they don't?

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scatpack

Limp Gawd
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I currently have a 19" LCD running at 1280x1024 and Im thinking of switching to a 22" WSXGA montior that runs at 1680 x 1050.

Do most games support that resolution? Im currently playing FEAR and see that it doesnt support it. What happens when games dont support that resolution? Does it run windowed with black side bars?

Just curious what Im gettting into with a new monitor. Thanks!
 
alot of semi-recent games can be hacked to work, if they dont support the resolution natively
 
if they cant be set to that rez? depends on your vid card and monitor, it may either stretched the image to full the screen, or leave black bars on the sides and center it in the middle. or you may be able to choose either.
 
Many support it, some do not. Fear and Battlefield games are examples of those which do not.

Not all will offer a choice of aspect ratio, and instead will give you a series of 4:3 aspect ratio resolutions, and include the 1680x1050 (16:10 ratio) at the end. If you can't run these games at maximum resolution, you will not get the proper aspect ratio and depending on the monitor, you'll get one of the following: 1. Black bars on the sides. 2. A slightly stretched image to fit the monitor's ratio 3. A 1:1 display of that resolution with blackness filling the rest. Some monitors will allow a choice between these.
 
Theres only a few games that dont support widescreen gaming, most of them can be hacked to work.

If they dont then depending on your video card you can do different things. The Nvidia drivers allow you to chose to either, let your monitor decide what to do, in which case the signal is sent "as is" and whatever the monitor is preset to do is what will happen. You can lock the resolution and the picture will stay in the middle. You can upscale the image so that it fits on the screen while keeping the correct aspect ratio and this will leave black borders either vertically or horizontally depending on what aspect ratio the original input was.

Im not sure what the ATI drivers allow, I suspcet something similar.
 
FEAR combat 1.08 added support for 1680x1050(and other 16:10 resolutions) without chaning any config files. States it in the readme.
 
Frosteh said:
Theres only a few games that dont support widescreen gaming, most of them can be hacked to work.
Click to expand...

Only a few newer games maybe, but loads of older games don't support widescreen.
 
You can run battlefield games in widescreen, but the top and bottom are chopped off compared to running at 4:3 where you get more screen space. Now to you if this means 16:10 isn't 'supported' in battlefield, then by that logic, 4:3 would not be 'supported' in games where running 4:3 would mean that the sides were cut off and where 16:10 gets more screen space.
 
BF has never supported "True" widescreen. BF does support a hacked wide screen resolution, which is really just a 4:3 resolution with the top and bottom cut off. The reasoning behind BF not supporting widescreen is that apparently Wide screen resolutions are cheating, *cough COP OUT *cough LAZY CODERS *cough.
 
Pretty much every game from the last 2-3 years has a way to enable that resolution.
I've been gaming on it for 6 months and almost every game I have supports it in one form or another. FEAR does support it and using a little editing always has.
Even if you're playing an older game, just set the res to 1280X1024 and it'll have small black bars...but still looks virtually "native" on most 1680X1050 setups. Just tell your drivers not to scale. You can also just let it stretch if you want. Most HDTV users have gotten used to stretching stuff anyway :p
For any info on widescreen gaming, it's all about http://www.widescreengamingforum.com

What's odd is that I don't really like widescreen movies. For me it feels like they're filling the screen with unnecessary panoramic sets. BUT...I think games, especially FPS games look a LOT better in widescreen. It just feels like a more natural field of vision for a person.
 
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