How important is it to run a **widescreen** TFT at it's Native Resolution?

wasc

wasc

wasc

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I plan to buy my brother a LCD monitor for his birthday in January and was looking at a widescreen 19" LCD which runs at 1440 x 900. His graphics card is a Geforce 6 series card so won't run all his games at that res - therefore I wanted to know if he can get away with running games at other resolutions???

I ask because I have a 19" LCD monitor (not widescreen) and I find some games look really nasty unless if I run the resolution at 1280 x 1024 (which is the monitors native res). I've heard you can get away with this more with a 17" LCD as these also run at 1280x1024 so the pixels are smaller diminishing the effect.
 
wasc said:
I plan to buy my brother a LCD monitor for his birthday in January and was looking at a widescreen 19" LCD which runs at 1440 x 900. His graphics card is a Geforce 6 series card so won't run all his games at that res - therefore I wanted to know if he can get away with running games at other resolutions???

I ask because I have a 19" LCD monitor (not widescreen) and I find some games look really nasty unless if I run the resolution at 1280 x 1024 (which is the monitors native res). I've heard you can get away with this more with a 17" LCD as these also run at 1280x1024 so the pixels are smaller diminishing the effect.
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Well thru VGA the 360 looks nice at 1366x768, and I game a lot of the time on my PC at that res (till I upgrade from my x800XT). It looks pretty good (to me). This is on a Dell 2007 20" monitor. If you dont like it, you could always do a 1:1 pixel map with it, so that it doesnt use all the screen, it just uses 1366x768 of the 1680x1050 pixels on the screen. Personally I like it set to full, and think it looks great.

Desktop though is best in 1680. Some games can be "hacked" to use widescreen mode, google widescreengaming and it will give you a site to help you out. Games played at 1280x1024 for example look a little "off" on a widescreen, so its always best to hack their res if you can. Most new games (made the past year or 2) support wide screen.

Hope that helps!
 
i guess it depends entirely on the screen, the game and how fussy you are. i've only had game i haven't been able to play at my native 1440x900 - and that was pro evo 5. i played at 1152x864 so it was stretched a fair bit. it looked fine to me but i guess some picky bugger would find fault with it..... :p
 
Whats most noticeable to me when Im running at a lower res than native is the text being more blurry and sometimes too big. The graphics are probably equally affected but its not as obvious to me. I have a 30in display which I can rarely run it at its native resolution so I found that if I just distance myself from the monitor a bit more when Im playing graphically intense games it makes the pixels less visible.
 
I've got a 22" WS and I wouldn't say it looks all that much worse outside of native rez, although I haven't really done any serious testing since all the games I've played so far (Quakeworld, Quake3, Oblivion, Chaser, Flatout 2, Dark Crusade) have worked at 1680x1050. As mentioned above, text (or static graphics for that matter) can look a little off, but in a flowing game with constantly changing graphics (e.g. FPS) it's not very noticeable.

What I would suggest in cases where the gfx card isn't powerful enough to run native res, is that people run in a quarter or the resolution with AA maxed. e.g. instead of 1680x1050, use 840x525. This should look OK when stretched since you will have exactly 4 'screen pixels' for every 'game pixel'. In any case, if his gf6 is a 6800GT/Ultra it might not be too bad in 1440x900 - it's a lower res than 1280x1024 don't forget.

As for 1280x1024 that is certainly a resolution I would avoid using on a WS monitor. 5:4 is drastically different from 8:5 and it is likely to looked very stretched horizontally.
 
He could keep his old monitor and run dual screens. That's what I do with my old 21" CRT and new 20" widescreen TFT. Best of both worlds.
 
When I had my x800 and my 20" widescreen I used to play loads of games at 1024X768. Never noticed a difference tbh.
 
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clv101 said:
He could keep his old monitor and run dual screens. That's what I do with my old 21" CRT and new 20" widescreen TFT. Best of both worlds.
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That is not an option i'm afraid ;) It's a 15" CRT we purchased in 1998 and the picture on it is going purple :)
 
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