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A friend of mine bought himself a big 24″ widescreen LCD not too long ago. It’s very nice, and playing games which don’t support the widescreen resolution isn’t much of an issue - and when they do, it’s impressive. With the high-definition era trying to cram itself down our consumerist throats, there will of course be plenty of software to take advantage of it over the coming years, right? Especially with these shiny new consoles. So why is it that a few companies still can’t even get some normal aspect ratios right?
I own an LCD. I dare say a good portion of you do as well. A 17″ TFT is pretty standard stuff now, in fact I see 19″ is becoming pretty popular. Both of these typically come with a native resolution of 1280×1024. CRTs are dying out fast, and more and more gamers are finding LCDs with low enough response times to suit their needs. If you look at the latest poll results on FiringSquad, as of this writing, 39% of their gaming-centric readership have this as their desktop resolution. This is followed by 1024×768 at only 16%. That’s a pretty big difference, whichever way you look at it.
So why is it, when these gamers want to play F.E.A.R, Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 or Battlefield 2, the only way to get the game playing in their native resolution is to dive in to the games configuration files and change the settings themselves in a text editor? I can’t help but think that adding this resolution as an option to the in-game menu would have taken them all of 15 minutes to do. The computer world has operated on 4:3 for ages and 5:4 for quite a few years now. If some are too lazy to keep up with even that, it doesn’t say much about their commitment to the gaming experience - and doesn’t give me confidence that widescreen 16:9 is anywhere on their radar at all.
24th March | Reply
Personally, I won’t buy any monitor or laptop unless it has a widescreen display. I don’t tend to use my laptop much for gaming but widescreen is almost essential at work for being able to review documents side-by-side without having to squint at the screen. In this respect and in light of the research performed, it seems reasonable to expect widescreen aspects and resolutions to be supported much more widely (no pun intended) in modern titles.
25th March | Reply
Well, I’ve had my laptop with widescreen display for about six months now and I haven’t really had a problem with any newer games supporting 1440×900 (or 1260×768 if I go Windowed). The only ones I can remember being a pain were Enemy Territory and UT2k4, but that was because you had to go and fiddle with config files (more of a pain in concept, my cfg-fu is still strong, if rusty). Still, a lot of the games I’ve tried have had pretty semless or near semless support for widescreen.
If anyone has any questions (or to find out of their favorite game works in Widescreen before buying a new moniter), Widescreen Gaming Forum has this awesome master list of how to get it working (it at all possible).
25th March | Reply
I still live with 800×600 because i’m old school…
I find that any higher hurts my eyes for some reason, like I am straining to see the screen. This may be to do with the size of the monitor (I couldnt actually tell you how big it is as I do not know..and the measuring tape is all the way over the other side of the room).
25th March | Reply
Erm, you can set BF2 to 1280×1024 from the menu, no need for config wizardry.
But yes, I wasn’t particularly impressed that the, otherwise excellent, Sands Of Time only supported resolutions up to 1024×768, which isn’t ideal on a 17 inch LCD at all.
25th March | Reply
BF2 does now? Either I’m going nuts or they just didn’t have that in the demo.
31st March | Reply
I’ll be writing a more indepth post on all this, but I just recently picked up a 50″ HDTV 1080p set (doesn’t take a 1080p signal, but that’s unlikely to be an issue for years, believe it or not as HDTV and Blu Ray are counter to popular belief going to launch at 1080i 60, which is more than enough for a 1080p set to turn into something practically indistinguishable to 1080p 24 with a bit of 3:2 pulldown, upscaling and deinterlacing… ps3 games aren’t likely to hit 1080p 60 any time soon either…) and I’ve been toying around with playing PC games in widescreen.
I think the feeling on 5:4 sets though, is that they’re not going to be around for long. I know most 17″ and 19″ gaming LCDs run at that res, but the problem with it isn’t just games that don’t run at 1280 x 1024, but the lack of lower 5:4 resolutions for when your PC can’t run titles at that resolution anymore. Then you’re looking at 4:3 distorted to 5:4.
In time (it’s not far off as Vista scales) you’ll be seeing more and more 1600 x 1200 17″ and 19″ monitors, and when that happens I think that 5:4 resolutions will die out. It’s always been a bit of a funky aspect ratio. We don’t want to be getting squarer after all. 1600 x 1200 of course has the benefit of 800 x 600 scaling really nicely to it, not to mention that monitors are if anything getting better and better at scaling.
Garnet, thanks for posting that list! I’m going to have to read up on which PC games I have that do support widescreen to see if any of my absolute favourites will be worth a replay.
Adding another aspect ratio takes more testing than adding another resolution, but why they can’t at least put it in the menus with a disclaimer saying ‘warning, graphical artifacts may occur at this resolution’ or something, I don’t know. I’d like 5:4 and 16:9 to see better support than they do, but 5:4 is a dead end.