Widescreen Gaming Forum

Do you have a 24" monitor but can't push 1920x1200 in Oblivion, and 1680x1050 isn't available? Would you like to try gaming at a 16:9 resolution for the extra FOV and have your video card letterbox it? Are you trying to test resolutions for a detailed report but some of them aren't available? Or maybe you'd just like to experiment with a weird resolution? This is the purpose of the tutorial.

This tutorial will allow you to use resolutions that aren't normally available to you, while letting your video card do the upscaling work so that your monitor doesn't have to, which results in better quality and a correct aspect ratio. It assumes a number of things, and this may not work if any of these are not the case:
You have a Geforce card, series 6 or better.
You have the Forceware drivers from nVidia.
You are using a widescreen LCD monitor via digital DVI.

Also, this tutorial may not work equally well for all resolutions. Here are some guidelines to increase the chances that your resolution will work right.
Neither resolution number (horizontal or vertical) should be greater than your monitor's maximum res.
The horizontal resolution number should not be below 800, and the vertical resolution number should not be below 600.
Both resolution numbers should be divisible by 4.

Personally, I recommend sticking with resolutions that can be found on other monitors (except for 1366x768 - use 1360x768 instead). But it is possible to use some really weird resolutions too. For the example, I am going to add 1068x600, a 16:9 resolution, to my monitor which has a native res of 1280x768, a 15:9 resolution. It will scale correctly and have the right amount of black bars.

First, open the nVidia Control Panel. Make sure that "Advanced View" is turned on. Go to Display->Appearance->Manage Custom Timings. You should get a menu that looks something like this, except your "Custom timings" box is probably empty.


If you have multiple monitors, select the monitor you want to add the resolution to, and click "Create."

In the next series of pictures, I have circled some fields. A red circle means "use this value." A blue circle means "use your own value." No circle means "leave it at whatever it defaults to."

After you click "Create," you'll get this menu (you may have to go through a disclaimer first):


Set the top two boxes to set your custom resolution. Refresh rate should be 60, Bits per pixel should be 32, and Interlaced should be off. Now click "Advanced." You'll get this:


Leave the back-end parameters alone for now. At the bottom, set the "Scaling type" to "Adapter." Set the bottom two boxes to your custom resolution, same as the top two boxes. Once that's done, look at the back-end parameters and set "Timing standard" to "Manual." You will get this:


Most of the settings should already be correct. Both sync polarities should be negative. If either one defaults to positive, change it. Also make sure that refresh rate is 60 and that your active horizontal pixels and active vertical lines are correct. Leave everything else the way it is.

Now click "Test." If all goes well, nothing will appear to happen, but it will report success. OK your way out.

Now, test your resolution. I recommend doing it from within the nVidia control panel in case something goes wrong. Go to "Change resolution attributes," and slide the resolution slider back until you hit your resolution. Now click "Apply." If the screen appears garbled or distorted, press Esc immediately. This resolution didn't work so well. But if you're lucky, it will work. In my case, it did, and my screen looked like this:


A note about the black bars: They do appear on my screen, but they do not show up in screenshots - a screenshot will come out at 1068x600 resolution without any black bars. I added them manually to show what it looks like on the screen. What this means for you is that if you have a 16:10 monitor and you add a 16:9 resolution this way (like 1280x720), you will see black bars on your monitor, but not on your screenshots.

Anyway, these black bars will only appear if your custom resolution has a larger aspect ratio than your native res. If it has a smaller aspect ratio, you'll get black bars on the left and right. If it has the exact same aspect ratio (such as 1680x1050 on a 1920x1200 monitor), you'll get no black bars at all.

This is good tutorial, exactly what I needed, although at first I was a little confused, when I read to go to "Display->Appearance->Manage Custom Timings" because I couldn't find it. It turns out that in my drivers (163.44 beta) it looks like this:



So in fact it is "Display -> Manage Custom Resolution" - I guess nVidia must have reworked their Control Panel a bit after this tutorial was written. Great job making it anyway :)

Too bad not even this works for me. Trying to use 4:3 resolutions on my ws monitor with black bars left and right.

Thank you!

When I read that it may not work with DVI connectivity I was afraid but it does work for me.

Thanks again!

Config:

Q6600
2 X 8800 GT SLI
Drivers version 169.28 beta
Samsung MS 245BW

This thread set me on the right track.

Solutions mentioned here does not work for me (OS: win7, GPU: GTS 250, SCREEN: BENQ G2420HDB), because the monitor has internal system, that automatically stretches the images. You have to change the setting in the monitor in order to create fixed resolution (with black bars on either side of the screen). The problem is, that it won't work. Monitor isn't going to let you change the display modes in your native resolution.

In this case, follow these steps:

1. Set your desktop resolution to desired one, in which you want to have black bars. The screen will be stretched and blurred, leave it this way.
2. Go to your monitors internal options menu (leave the mouse and keyboard alone, use buttons on the monitor itself)
3. Under "picture advanced" section find an entry "display mode", enter it and change to "aspect" - or try messing around with the settings until you find an equivalent in the case of different monitor

Done. You should now have black bars. This is not your native resolution and therefore the view in windows is going to be a little blurred. Ignore it and launch a game or some other application for which you are probably doing this - the view should be clear.

To reset everything, you only need to change your desktop resolution to native. Monitor should reset it's internal setting automatically.
I hope this will help some googler someday. God knows, I spent many hours until I found out this simple solution. At least now I am able to run ancient games without stretching.

To the forum natives - I've registered here just to post this, sorry for ressurecting an old thread. If it's already known, I wasn't able to find it described anywhere. Felt like sharing as it's a live problem for many games these days, like Warcraft III, Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War, LOTR: Battle for Middle Earth II and so on. Virtually all games released before 2009 have this problem.

The monitor's "internal system" shouldn't make a difference. If the custom resolution is done right (though the tutorial here for doing it is quite outdated), the monitor should only "see" native resolution. In other words, suppose you want to use 1920x698 on your 1920x1200 monitor. The video card should render a 1920x698 image, then add black bars to it, making it a 1920x1200 image, and that is what gets sent to the monitor. The monitor's mechanisms for dealing with non-native resolutions shouldn't even activate, because the monitor has no idea you are running a non-native resolution.

Well, I'm not an expert on that technology, but it doesn't work that way for me. Videocard is not adding black bars to it. And mind you, I tried it with 2 different cards (since I was replacing one anyway). The only way I was able to render non-native resolution image on the screen with black bars on either side is the one I described above - changing monitors internal settings.

Then you're doing something wrong. Are your custom resolutions using automatic timing? And do you have aspect scaling turned on?

I did tried all the solutions suggested in this thread as well as in other sources on the internet, none of it had any relevant effect (displayed image distortion - sure, but no black bars in any way anywhere).
I was able to get black bars and correct display only when I enabled "aspect" mode in my monitors internal settings (no other tweaking was required after that. All settings left on default, except for desired resolution, of course).

It could be just that particular monitors unique feature, I don't know.

If the GPU is configured correctly, and the monitor supports DVI, then the monitor's "features" (other than supporting DVI) should not matter at all.