Widescreen Gaming Forum

I've been very happy the last 4 years with my Samsung 4:3 monitor @ 1600x1200 and have resisted going widescreen because I felt like I'd be losing something (specifically, >100 vertical pixels) by going widescreen at 1680x1050 or 1920x1080. I'd want to go 1920x1200 if anything, but those are too rich for my blood, price-conscious as I am: twice the price of a 1920x1080 - outrageous difference. I was also conscious of the performance hit on a video card that was doing "ok" at 1600x1200 and making it push significantly more pixels.

But, times change, and for a couple of different reasons I'm looking at going widescreen on my PC, specifically, a 16:9 1920x1080 (couldn't bring myself to go with a 16:10 1680x1050; fewer pixels for the same price). It's less than an inch larger diagonally than my Samsung, while pushing only 8% more pixels, and providing a finer pixel pitch, so I'm expecting my visual experience to change very little (framerates, image quality) other than adding widescreen.

So the big question at the end of all that is, have any of you had any trouble with games not supporting 16:9 resolutions, only 16:10? I imagine most of the newer games like Mass Effect 2 and Battlefield BC 2 probably natively support both 16:9 and 16:10 resolutions, but maybe older, pre-HDTV-era games? If so, how do you handle that? Do you choose a 16:10 res in-game and hope the monitor doesn't slice 60 pixels off the top and bottom? Or force a custom res in an .ini file or something? Or am I thinking about this way too much?

Thanks,
JT

Given allot of games are ports nowadays your more likely to have problem with getting 16:10 support then 16:9, that said its extremely rare to have a modern game not list ether 16:10 for 16:9 resolutions. The only real difference will be if they properly correct their FoV for the different aspect ratios, that information you'll find all over this site so you'll need to look it up on a game by game bases there is no single answer for all games.

Given allot of games are ports nowadays your more likely to have problem with getting 16:10 support then 16:9, that said its extremely rare to have a modern game not list ether 16:10 for 16:9 resolutions. The only real difference will be if they properly correct their FoV for the different aspect ratios, that information you'll find all over this site so you'll need to look it up on a game by game bases there is no single answer for all games.

Thanks Skid. I expected current games to support both, but my backlog of games waiting to be played includes games from every year from 1997 to 2010 (except 2008, guess I played everything I wanted to play that year), so I'm glad I had a buddy who mentioned this place to me a while back - I'm very impressed by the breadth and depth of the database of older games represented here! It looks like for the most part after a cursory glance most of the hack/ini/command-line/etc. methods allow for "custom" resolutions (by which I mean, enter your own rather than choose from a list), which solves the main thing I was worried about (having to choose an aspect ratio that doesn't match my monitor).

Game on!