Widescreen Gaming

[Al Khalifah]

A lot of modern displays (especially for notebooks) are sporting widescreen displays rather than the traditional dimensions. Does this affect their gaming performance, or rather, has the games industry recognised this and supported it or is there just a letterbox effect?

[Mikeus Caesar]

I myself use a widescreen monitor (Acer 1916LW i think, 16:10 ratio) and it is truely brilliant. Playing counter-strike:source feels like you're in a movie. Games like Black & White 2 take on a whole new epic scale.

Unfortunately older games aren't compatible with widescreen resolutions (they use old skool 4:3 ratio), and for some reason the occasional modern game comes out where the developers have forgotten about widescreen, Prey is a good example. I have to run it in 1024x786 resolution, which makes things look a bit pixelated.

But i definitely recommend a widescreen monitor. The pros outweigh the cons by a gigantic amount.

Plus, if you use a tabbed internet browser like Opera, you can fit more tabs on screen!

[drone]

I think that since notebooks are becoming more popular for gaming, newer games are accomodating the widescreen option. With LCD screens becoming cheaper and more common for desktops, the widescreen models should start getting love from developers as well.

MTW looks weird on my girlfriend's laptop though...

[Lemur]

There's a big ol' forum devoted to nothing but getting widescreen gaming to work. I get the imperssion that fixes are out there, but they're not always obvious.

[hoom]

The better coded games out there will happily run at any resolution supported by the driver including the legendary Total Annihilation from 1997.
TA was pretty much the first thing I tried when I got my 24" LCD & it plays just fine at 1920*1200 :)

The not so well coded games even quite recent eg Battlefield2 only support 4:3 resolutions so I have to play at 1600*1200.

Some monitors handle 4:3 by letterboxing (on the sides) while others just stretch the horizontal out.
My monitor stretches 1600*1200 but is optional for other resolutions & while technically 1600*1200 stretched out to 1920*1200 is a distorted picture, in practice I haven't really noticed it in most games.