TR Forums

I am a complete newbie when it comes to LCD's coz until recently, I had never used an LCD before. I used to read about LCD's having this native resolution and if they weren't used at that particular resolution, the results would be bad and lower resolutions would have black borders around them, meaning lower resolutions wouldn't stretch to full screen of the display.

Now I am a weirdo in that I game occasionally at the lowest possible resolution, preferably 640x480 though sometimes games might not offer anything lower than 800x600. I have tried these resolutions on IBM and DELL laptops now and all of them could stretch the resolutions to the full screen. Which displays then are those that are unable to do this full screen stretching of lower resolutions? I need to know coz I might buy an LCD monitor in the near future and I don't want to end up with something that can't do this stretching.

It isn't a question of whether they can do the stretching or not, it is a matter of the quality of the image. Whenever you run an LCD at anything other than its native resolution, there will be scaling artifacts. This will be most noticeable on text, but will be visible on games as well (some pixelation and "jaggies").

Also, if you run full-screen, and the resolution of the game doesn't have the same aspect ratio as the monitor, the entire image will be distorted (compressed vertically or horizontally). E.g., a game that is set to 800x600 (4:3 aspect) will look rather strange if you stretch it to full-screen on a 1280x1024 (5:4 aspect) monitor.

I'm not concerned with quality. Anyone who plays games at 640x480 is obviously not bothered with jaggies or any other artifacts. I just want to know why some LCD monitors show black borders around lower resolutions while others stretch the lower resolution to full screen?

What you're seeing is the action of the scaler in the monitor. Some of them have advanced scalers and some do not. Most of them have settings that allow the monitor to display the lower resolution centered, stretched to fill the full screen or stretched with a constant aspect ratio. Of these, I recommend the ASPECT setting for most applications.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_resolution

Igor_Kavinski wrote:

Which displays then are those that are unable to do this full screen stretching of lower resolutions? I need to know coz I might buy an LCD monitor in the near future and I don't want to end up with something that can't do this stretching.

Usually desktop LCDs will do fullscreen stretch so I wouldn't worry. You are actually the opposite of what most people complain about: the stretching without considering the aspect ratio. For best results, I recommend getting an LCD monitor with Aspect scaling, so your image will not look weird, but with some black borders (basically the scaler stretch in both horizontal and vertical until one dimension hit the max, leaving the other dimension with black borders).

As long as you have an nVidia card, then you can control your scaling through that instead of on the monitor.

May I ask you a question, why are you playing games at the lowest resolution???

Today games look so good in high or medium resolution. you are missing all the fun.

Everything being equal, it would be very curious to me to want to game in 640x480 over 800x600 or higher, unless it has something to do with poor eyesight.