Games not being preserved at aspect ratio - being stretched to fill my 21:9 screen

heartburnron · 30 May 2017 at 18:19

So this just started happening over the past week. Most of the games I play support 21:9 anyway but I'm having a replay of Resident Evil 5 which doesn't and it's stretching the 16:9 ratio across my screen. Worse still is I'm also playing the Cat Lady which has a 4:3 ratio so it look particularly bad stretched across ultrawide.

The only thing I can think of that it may be linked to is that I've been using the Flawless Widescreen fix to play KOTOR as it seems to be after a play of that the stretching starts for other games. My desktop though is unaffected and any game that supports 21:9 is fine. The first time it happened I was able to resolve the issue by simply restarting Windows although this is no longer working.

I've checked and 'preserve aspect ratio' is selected ok in my AMD Driver settings. I've also checked reset the monitor settings back to default. Anyone got any ideas as to what I can try to resolve it? I've also tried updating my drivers but no luck. Any thoughts / suggestions?

heartburnron · 30 May 2017 at 22:22

No it's nothing to do with 21:9 support - this only started happening 2 weeks ago, previous to that if a game only supported 4:3 or 16:9 then that is how they were displayed with black bars at the side. Now though, it is stretching all games to fill the screen even though I have not adjusted any settings. I can't choose to have any game displayed at 4:3 or 16:9 and none of the settings in the driver settings or on the monitor are making any difference. The driver settings are set to centre and GPU scaling is off. I also have the monitor set to 1:1. It may be just coincidence, but this used to happen after using the FWS fix to play Star Wars KOTOR - if I played a game immediately afterwards that didn't support 21:9, the game would be stretched across the screen however restarting windows used to correct this but now it seems to be stuck. I did a clean install of the drivers and even tried different drivers but I can't get the monitor to display any games with black bars at the side (never thought I'd be complaining that I couldn't get black bars!) Would something in the FWS fix have altered one of the settings in windows perhaps?

The RE5 FWS fix doesn't work with the Steam version by the way - it crashes once there is a cut scene sadly.

heartburnron · 30 May 2017 at 22:54

Ah, yes sorry I didn't read Harry's post correctly. I also thought it unlikely to by FWS causing it but it was just the only link I could make to it behaving that way. I'll have to look into the monitor drivers then...

heartburnron · 31 May 2017 at 00:00

Nexus18 said:
I doubt it is anything to do with device manager/monitor drivers but it is worth a shot.

Indeed. Appreciate your help. Cheers.

heartburnron · 31 May 2017 at 21:48

harry5522 said:
Just to be clear, are you sure windows hasn't updated around the time the issue started? Could be that creators is causing it ? I can check my re5 when I get home from work to see if I get the same issue.

Mmm could be Harry. The timeline certainly fits. I'd appreciate you taking the time to check. Is your monitor also ultrawide?

heartburnron · 31 May 2017 at 23:20

Nice one Harry. Just on the subject of RE5 - I bought the DLC recently but has uninstalled the game and you have to progress past certain chapters in the game to be able to access the DLC levels - I was quite surprised but how much I've enjoyed playing through it again - it kind of gets dismissed because of the way the Resident Evil games went after RE4 but, all of that stuff aside, RE5 is actually a really good and fun action horror game - unfairly under rated in my opinion...

heartburnron · 1 Jun 2017 at 19:07

harry5522 said:
Well mine is really weird as of booting up tonight.

Taken a couple of photographs as could not screenshot to get the same effect.

As you can see on these the game is just cropping it on my screen to fill it up. I am set up for 1:1 so should black bar me.

Cheers Harry - that is how mine looks if I select 3440x1440 - the game at last attempts to display it. However I'd be interested to know if you change the resolution to 1920x1080 do you get black bars at the side? Mine is stretched across the screen...

heartburnron · 1 Jun 2017 at 19:09

Amnesia said:
do you have a resolution setup for what you are trying to run it at?
also try changing to that resolution to make sure you get the black borders and it isnt set to fit to screen. if that works then stay in that resolution and launch the game.

Thanks for the suggestion. What exactly do you mean? Do you mean in set up in Windows? For any game, regardless of what resolution I select from the in game options, it stretches what ever the selected resolution is across the 21:9 display.

heartburnron · 1 Jun 2017 at 19:23

So I was just looking in the display adapter properties and in the monitor (that it labels as 'Generic PnP monitor') properties under events I found this:

21/05/2017 11:51:48 Device not migrated
21/05/2017 11:51:48 Device configured (monitor.inf)
21/05/2017 11:51:48 Device started (monitor

The information available for the Device not migrated says this:

Device DISPLAY\ACR044F\5&6b8e4bb&14&UID256 could not be migrated.
Last Device Instance Id: DISPLAY\Default_Monitor\5&6b8e4bb&12&UID0
Class Guid: {4d36e96e-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}
Location Path:
Migration Rank: 0xF000FFFF0000F100
Present: false
Status: 0xC0000719

I have no idea what this mean however I did reset the monitor back to default settings when I first started getting the issue in attempt to resolve it. These messages could have been on the date that I reset the monitor but I can't be sure. Does anyone know if these messages would be displayed in the events tab after resetting a monitor back to default settings? If the answer is yes, then I guess I can dismiss this message as unrelated as the issue was there before I did the reset. If not, any clue as to what that means?

heartburnron · 1 Jun 2017 at 19:25

harry5522 said:
Okay just run this quickly now and i do get black bared at 1920x1080. I will try a few things and see if i can replicate your issue.

Appreciate your help mate. I do think however that my issue isn't related to just RE5 - it's any game at all that doesn't support 21:9 but it's worth a try...

heartburnron · 1 Jun 2017 at 19:32

Ok, so some more data for the picture. If I change my resolution in the Windows settings for the display, it will display my desktop at whatever the selected resolution is so I guess that means that the monitor is capable of recognising and displaying the settings in Windows. Why then is it stretching the games? It's as if it isn't acknowledging the settings in the driver settings to either 'preserve the aspect ratio' or 'centre' under scaling mode - you would expect this stretching to happen only if 'full panel' was selected, which it never has been...

As a side note - I noticed in the display settings on windows that it doesn't provide an option to set the desktop resolution to 2560x1440 - it goes from 3440x1440 down to 1920x1200. If as a workaround I wanted to set my desktop resolution to 2560x1440 and then launch the game, as I think Amnesia was suggesting a few posts back, is there a way to add a custom resolution in the windows display settings? I can see an option for custom scaling, but not for resolution. If I select 1920x1080 - I get a small desk top in the middle of my screen framed in black, which makes sense given that is the area of pixels being used for that resolution I guess.

heartburnron · 1 Jun 2017 at 19:57

harry5522 said:
If your sig spec is correct then i believe that you are using an Fury X? if so then IIRC the AMD control panel has the ability to do this.

Ah yes, I noticed that before come to think of it. Cheers for that. I might use it as a last resort although I'd really like to get to the bottom of what the hell is going on...

heartburnron · 4 Jun 2017 at 19:01

JTrickle said:
I had this problem until I worked out how to create a 2560 1440 Windows desktop res. Easy with nvidia, not so much with and catalyst.

That way if you have a game that won't do 21:9, it will have a 2560 option.

Amnesia said:
yea make sure that you are capable of displaying the resolution with borders so not stretched in windows itself first. if you do then stay in that resolution and launch the game

Yeah thanks guys - I can probably do that ok as a workaround but I never had to do this before a few weeks ago - it would always have provided the black bars if the resolution was not 21:9. I just tried another couple of older games that I knew I played at either 16:9 or 4:3 with black bars and they are now being stretched across the screen too. It's not that big of a deal really - over 90% of my games either support 21:9 or I've found some form of fix or mod to get them running in 21:9. The remaining 10% of games I haven't been able set to my resolution tend to be older games where the graphics are dated anyway so it doesn't look so bad stretched across the screen, it's just doing something it isn't supposed to and doing my nut in that I can't figure out what is causing it!

Some games list 3440x1440 in the screen resolution options but display the game in 16:9 with black bars at the side anyway - South Park The Stick of Truth and Godeater Resurrection do this - for all PCs, they are supposed to that and it's not my issue. I was just experimenting with South Park and when I select the 3440x1440 resolution for the options it displays the black bars at the side as it always did - however when I select 1920x1080 or any resolution below that, it stretches the game across the whole screen. So the issue is definitely that something is telling my PC to do this but if it isn't the settings in the monitor or driver settings then where else could it be?