Widescreen Gaming Forum

Hello together,

first of all i wish to express that i am really glad to have found this page.
Today i got my Dell Inspirion XPS Gen2 Notebook.
But this widescreen thing is a bit mysterious to me.

I tryed several game with your solution like BF2, BFV and WC3.

Now i have some questions left:

1. In my point of view these games look all a bit stretched to me. Expecially Warcraft 3 looks to wight in my eyes.
Is it right, that if a game does not support widescreen you can only fix it by hacking or editing cons etc. But does this mean that you have a picture like any CRT user has, i mean, does this mean that i have a non stretched screen when using your tips properly?

2. When looking at the example screenshots i think most of the pictures are stretched when adapted to widescreen, or is there a mistake of mine?

3. Is widescreen gaming the future? I don't have any overview. Is it supportet more often now? Is a widescreen notebook the right gamer machine???

3. Thanks for your help. I know that my questions may be idiotic but i would be very glad if you could answer. Because in germany i have a "Fernabsatzgesetz" that gives me the chance to send the notebook back within 14 days so i could get my money back!

Manny greets!!!!

Jive

Welcome to the forum. :)

1) Unfortunately, you've just named three of the worst culprits for stretching when forcing widescreen.

2) If you check the HUD, it looks stretched - this is because the HUD is a 2D overlay. Games such as Quake 3 engine games (eg: Jedi Knight 2) are at the correct field of view for the aspect ratio in the game world, but not for the HUD.

3) It is the future, though arguably more in consoles than in PC's at the minute. It's really a bit annoying; some brand new games support widescreen perfectly (Half-Life 2) others have every last possible method of getting widescreen to work disabled. Some really old games support widescreen, while some don't. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to which games do and which games don't.

4) We will be covering these in the FAQ when it's published here. Hope you like your purchase, and don't let a few games put you off - widescreen is useful for so much more than just gaming (although gaming is obviously important ;))

Thank you very much Paradign Shifter.
@1 Can you point out a bit more, what you mean with
"Unfortunately, you've just named three of the worst culprits for stretching when forcing widescreen". I think i don't understand the message ;)

@2 But when i take Wc3 and Battlefield Vietnam and look at the screens. Both Widescreens look VERY stretched to me. Is this really the effect? Must i live with this when playing these games?

I think i cannot chance the field of view in WC3, can i ?

Thanks for to all for your help in advance!!!

Jive

You're welcome. :)

1) My first point meant that Warcraft 3, Battlefield 1942/Vietnam and Battlefield 2 all stretch. You can get the resolutions pixel perfect, so you don't have the ugly blurring that occurs when running at non-native resolutions on a TFT, but you can't alter the FOV to make it true widescreen.

2)Pretty much. There is no adequate way of solving the FOV problem with WC3 & the BF games. And no, you can't change the FOV in WC3. So yeah... play those games, and you'll have to put up with stretching. Dependent on what graphics card or monitor you have, you can always run them at 4:3 with black borders down the sides. Not a perfect fix, but if the stretching is that offputting, then it's worth it. :)

SO if were running BF2 in 4:3 on 2405, what would be the actual screen size? would it be the equivalent of dropping down to a 17" monitor?

If you ran at the 'native' 4:3 res, it would be 1600x1200. Not sure what the 4:3 diagonal would be, although 17-19" seems like a good estimate. You can't get 1600x1200 17" TFT's, though. :)

True, but i'm getting 1600x1200 on my 20" (200.1FP) now.... I so badly want to find a rationale to buy this thing but......

Thanks again, Paradigm Shifter.
It is great to get this support here.
I justed came home from a journey (hadn't my notebook with me) and tryed this 4:3 thing. 1600*1200 is still a great resolution and these black borders don't look to bad to me. I must say, that i tryed WC3 just while writing this.
I think i can hold my notenbook, though i'll test more games on time. When games are stretched some of them don't look good anymore.

You just meantend the FoV in BFV. If i adapt the FoV in BFV the stretching should be history? If using 1920*1600 the FoV must be 1.2, doesn't it?

Thanks a lot for your ongoing help.
You can imagine what i was afraid of, don't you? THis stretching was a real shock to me.

cu
Jive

Happy to help. :)

Some games don't look too bad when stretched, others look terrible. It's often personal taste, though, as with so much to do with computers. ;)

I don't actually own BF:V, so I'm working purely on others reports. I guess the best thing to do would be to read the relevant threads. But I think it's something like 1.2.