Monitor

[Ed TW]

I'm getting a widescreen LCD monitor. With gamming, like TW, will the screen be cropped out on the sides (full screen format), or will it fill out the whole screen horizontally?
Also I'm crossed between these two monitors. They’re about $30 different in price. One has a speed of 2ms and the other 5ms. What do you think?


Acer AL2216WBD 22"
Specifications

Display Type: TFT LCD
Viewable Screen Size: 22 inches
Pixel Pitch: 0.28 mm
Input Video Signal: 15-pin D-sub
DVI-D
Contrast Ratio: 700:1
Brightness: 300 cd/m²
Response Time: 5 ms
Horizontal Viewing Angle: 170 degrees
Vertical Viewing Angle: 160 degrees
Maximum Resolution: 1680 x 1050


Samsung 2253LW 21.6"
Specifications

Viewable Screen Size: 21.6 inches
Pixel Pitch: 0.258 mm
Display Area: 464.94 mm (H) x 290.58 mm (V)
Display Colors: 16.7 million
Vertical Refresh Rate: 56 ~ 75 Hz
Horizontal Frequency: 30 ~ 81 kHz
Input Video Signal: DVI-D
VGA
Contrast Ratio: 1000:1
Dynamic Contrast Ratio: 8000:1
Response Time: 2 ms
Maximum Resolution: 1680 x 1050

[LeftEyeNine]

The format of the visibility will depend on the game's support for widescreen.

Between your alternatives for a monitor, on terms of both contrast ratio and response time (which is vital for gaming), Samsung looks like a far better choice.

[Quirinus]

Ah, I was going to make a thread like this.... well, I just bought a laptop with a 1280 x 800 screen, and now RTW and every other game is stretchy-looking. Is there any way to at least crop out the sides? Setting the resolution to 1024 x 768 or whatever doesn't seem to help.

[Husar]

It's a bit complicated, it will only look good if the game supports widescreen resolutions, if it doesn't you can go to your NVidia driver settings(I guess ATI/AMD has it too but I don't know their drivers), widescreen options and then tell it to use a fixed aspect or whatever it's called, there are two options, one that keeps the aspect and stretches it so it fits the screen in one direction so you get black bars only on two sides and the other is basically 1:1 pixel mapping so you get black bars on all four sides depending on the resolution.

now some screens can also do this, one reason I settled for the Benq 24" is that it does it pretty well so it also works with the PS3, someother monitors like the Samsung SM224B or so have their problems with that. It might help to search google for tests and user experiences to find out about it as manufacturers will hardly say that their pixel mapping doesn't really work.

[Quirinus]

Thanks, I tried and it works now, though the "No scaling" option just shuts down the monitor, and I have to reboot my computer to get it back.

The annoying thing is that, while it works fine for RTW on the campaign map, I get a CTD whenever I enter the battle map-- custom battles included. I know this isn't a mod-specific problem because I tested it with three different mods and vanilla. Do you know what the problem is?

EDIT: Sorry, it was a problem with overwritten files. But still. Playing GalCiv, a very old game, I got freezes and CTDs... which is messed up. Hopefully it's a problem with the game.

[Husar]

I'm using these options as well and never had a problem on both my PCs, do you have the latest drivers or are you perhaps using very old ones?

The other option is too look in your monitor OSD, if the monitor can do it you could try using the monitor's scaling, that way the scaling can hardly cause a crash.

Or it's a fault of the game as you mentioned.

[Lehesu]

The Samsung is certainly the better monitor. The response time is faster and the contrast ratio is better.