Widescreen Gaming Forum

Hello everyone. I've been around lurking for a few years - since the 5xxx AMD series cards hit the market back a few years ago and I set up my own Eyefinity surround setup with a 5970. Over the years, I made a few switches, and a long story short, recently built a new system utilizing a 29" UW 21:9 (Asus). I watched some of the reviews on the site here, which ultimately helped me pull the trigger on it ($479 last week on Newegg was the best I could do with this, and it's worth every penny, for my own budget)

My experiences with this monitor - aside from the actual Picture quality (colors, response) being CRUSHINGLY better than my dated 23' HannsG that I had setup for 3x1080p - are that I feel the 21:9 aspect is really ideal for gaming. Movies are a given, so I won't go into them much, but with my experience over the past week or so of using this, on different types of games like FirstPerson Shooters, ThirdPerson Action/HacknSlash, and Isometric perspective RTS/RPG games is that I find the "sweet spot" of the ViewPort, where the action happens, and Well designed UI will not be interefering, is really opened up with the wider aspect ratio. At first it seems almost, overwhelming. (which is what I always felt with the 3screen surround - I would had prefered to have 1/2 rendering on the side panels) but given a little bit to get used to scanning the edges of the display, it feels very natural. My only caveat would be that the display isn't curved slightly, as that would eliminate any issues with the edges being too far away from your center, making them always appear to be angled - same reason why you angle in the side panels on 3monitor setups.

Well, one of the main reasons I wanted to give my little review here was that I played around with different streaming options. One my old Eyefinity setup I would merely broadcast the center monitor (16:3 on a 16:9 is really really awful to view) for 16:9 compatibility. With this screen, I find letterboxing is the best way for viewers (Who I would assume 95% are using a 16:9 aspect for viewing purposes), and I have briefly played with some of the Scenescaping to frame my image capture. My stream is www.twitch.tv/ahkrael - I play around with my stream layout a bit time to time, but I should have a few VoDs of different games.