Widescreen Gaming Forum

I just bought the Dell 2007WFP and it's taking some time to get used to the 16:10 resolution.

Some games do not support 16:10 ratio and I would like to have say, a 1024x768 resolution (4:3 ratio) with black bars on the side.

To illustrate, when playing Getting Up, my screen looks like this:

This image is stretched.




On my old CRT, the screen looked like this:





THIS IS WHAT I WOULD LIKE TO HAVE. Is there any way to get my screen to look like this:




Please help...

Sure.. tell your video card that your monitor is doing the stretching (digital flat panel settings in the nvidia panel), and tell your monitor you want a 1:1 screen ratio.

I'm playing around with the video card settings, but I have an ATI card. Anyone familiar with ATI's Catalyst Control Center?

I'll keep tinkering...

You can create black bars with powerstrip to keep your 4:3(or whatever ratio) if you want. You can have black bars with any 4:3 resolution. Do a search in the forum and you will find several threads about gaming with black bars.

But since i´m a nice guy I did a search for you and found this: using widescreen as 4:3

Tip: Try the search function.

Why, yes, you are a nice guy! I read up on the info and I still had some problems. I then tinkered around with the monitor's options and it allows me to switch between widescreen, 1:1 ratio or 4:3 ratio - that solved everything. Thanks for the hlpe WGF...

I'm playing around with the video card settings, but I have an ATI card. Anyone familiar with ATI's Catalyst Control Center?

I'll keep tinkering...

yes the ATI control panel has an option to center the screen on resolutions not native to the LCD

Huh, since when? only Nvidia has that. :?

Huh, since when? only Nvidia has that. :?

no, only nvidia has ratio scaled centered timings.

all that means is that on ati you may have black bars on the top and bottom as well

Is there any solution for people with VX2025wm monitor and 7900 video card? Those out of range errors really suck. I really hope there's some software that can trick the monitor, like what pingspike described in the other post, without depending on the driver. As far as I know, powerstrip still uses the driver solution for this kind of thing.

Or does anyone know if there's any trustworthy modified driver set that solve the problem?

Is there any solution for people with VX2025wm monitor and 7900 video card? Those out of range errors really suck. I really hope there's some software that can trick the monitor, like what pingspike described in the other post, without depending on the driver. As far as I know, powerstrip still uses the driver solution for this kind of thing.

Or does anyone know if there's any trustworthy modified driver set that solve the problem?

I also have a VX2025, and have been reading about this problem, actually saw you post about this over in the EVGA forum..........what exactly causes this? When your trying to run 75 hertz at 1680x1050, or 75 hertz at a lower resolution?? I still havnt ran into this problem, and I just want to know what I can do to avoid it, thanks.

It is a common problem this monitor has with 7900 video card (if you have something other than 79xx, then you are fine). If you select anything other than "Monitor Scaling" in the nvidia control panel, the monitor will give an error saying "Out of Range". This mean any 4:3 game can only be played stretched.

That 75Hz thing is just something else someone bring up in the eVGA forum. Not quite the same as my main problem :) I am fine with running everything in 60Hz.

Just out of curiosity.

Even though you've instructed the Video Card to display your picture at a 4:3 aspect ratio, technically we're still scaling right?
Because we're not running the picture at the monitor's native resolution, even though it is only using the requisite number of pixels to output a 4:3 image.

Just out of curiosity.
Even though you've instructed the Video Card to display your picture at a 4:3 aspect ratio, technically we're still scaling right?
Because we're not running the picture at the monitor's native resolution, even though it is only using the requisite number of pixels to output a 4:3 image.

I believe the video card takes the image, scales it up as to what you selected (either centered output or fixed aspect ratio) and then adds the black bars to fill the rest of the native resolution. So no scaling, because the monitor is recieving it's native resolution.

It is a common problem this monitor has with 7900 video card (if you have something other than 79xx, then you are fine). If you select anything other than "Monitor Scaling" in the nvidia control panel, the monitor will give an error saying "Out of Range". This mean any 4:3 game can only be played stretched.

That 75Hz thing is just something else someone bring up in the eVGA forum. Not quite the same as my main problem :) I am fine with running everything in 60Hz.

When I researching the problem for the 7800gtx (this is before I switched the cable to the other DVI plug- which fixed it for me), I noticed that windows was detecting the native resolution of 1680x1050 at 75 hertz. I tried tinkering with powerstrip to create a custom driver to make the max 60hertz, but I never got it to work.

I read on some forum (I did a lot of reading to try and troubleshoot the problem, but no one had a solution) that if they plugged in a different monitor after outputting the special scaling - it would report the resolution at 1680 x 1050 at 75 hertz. I believe it is a monitor driver problem (or whatever controls the native resolution - I think the monitor reports it also).

On my 7800gtx, I was able to switch the dvi cord to the other plug and it worked afterwards - now windows reports the correct native resolution (and the scaling works great). Unfortantly, LostHere has already confirmed it doesn't work with the 7900s.

Oh that really sucks! I just bought a Viewsonic VX2025wm and get those "Out of range" messages with my 7900 GT. I was so looking forward to Battlefield 2 at 1680 x 1050.

If *anyone* knows *anything* that can help I'd be eternally grateful.

I had tried changing the advance timing to display 1680x1050 at 60Hz, and also fix the refresh rate at 60Hz in dxdiag, but they did not solve the problem.

I think it is a video card driver problem, since people mentioned it worked on older nvidia video cards, and also on ATI Radeon's cards.

Unfortunately, modified drivers do not work too.

I guess the only thing to do is wait.

I have a confirmed solution for 4:3 games playing unstretched of a widescreen monitor, using an Nvidia card (5900gx) with vx2025 monitor

Firstly you need to be using DVI. I tried connecting my vx2025 widescreen through analog and it will automatically stretch every resolution it is capable of to fill the entire screen... ugly. Even if you change to "fixed aspect ratio" timings under the timing settings. It doesnt work. However connect with DVI and you get an extra panel in the Nvidia options called "digital flat panel" settings. Here change it to run with fixed aspect ratio. Now any 4:3 resolutions eg, 1024 x 768 etc will run with black bars down the side of the monitor, and widescreen resolutions eg 1280 x 800 etc will utilise the full extents of the screen.

Also setting up new custom 16:10 res in the add resolution option works fine with this. I added 1088 x 680. not a default res but works fine.

So in short. use DVI not analog and you should be able to get this to work.

Hope this helps people out.

I imagined it would work on 5900, since 7900 is the only card that has problem. The 7900 cards has 2 dvi port and no analog port.

I actually tried using a dvi-to-analog converter thing to try using the monitor in analog mode. Although there isn't any out of range error with this setting, I cannot display 4:3 ratio since even decreasing the horizontal length (via Manual Image Adjust) to 0 is not enough to sqeeze it to 4:3.

At least now I am more certain it is nvidia's driver problem (or 7900 hardware problem).

[quote]I'm playing around with the video card settings, but I have an ATI card. Anyone familiar with ATI's Catalyst Control Center?

I'll keep tinkering...

yes the ATI control panel has an option to center the screen on resolutions not native to the LCD

Hmm, Are you sure?
Since which version of CCC? (Could you take an screenshot or explain in which setting-section of CCC it is?)

and it would work for x1900xt + Syncmaster 205BW?

I would like to have that confirmed before buying the monitor...

I just bought the Dell 2007WFP and it's taking some time to get used to the 16:10 resolution.
[...]
Please help...

Since you've got a Dell, it's indeed quite easy to solve the problem. Open the OSD, go to "Displays settings" then "wide mode" and chose either 1:1 or 4:3 instead of the normal mode. Of course you'll have to do this each time you'll switch from a 16:10 resolution to a 4:3 one but it's better than trying to tell to your video card to not stretch the image, especially with an Ati.