4:3 on widescreen?

[Remy]

Hi guys,

I'm finally going to buy a new monitor in a few days and am seriously considering a 19" widescreen. The most important question for me right now is how do games that only support 4:3 resolutions or DVD movies with a 4:3 aspect ratio look on widescreen monitors? Is the picture being stretched or are there black bars on the sides? If the picture is being stretched, how noticable is the effect?

[ZuljinRaynor]

Hopefully it does Pillarboxing. I know TVs will do that but monitors... not quite sure. Movies should run fine while games I'm not quite sure about.

[8IronBob]

Well, what my HDTV does is when you hook a PC in via DVI connection, the graphics card that I got (nVidia 6600 256MB) will automatically fill the whole real estate of my Westinghouse 32". Of course, now that HDMIs are replacing DVIs as far as connectivity (even tho some TVs still have DVI connections). I better hope that graphics cards of the future will support HDMI as well, can't be too sure about where the future of PC/HDTV connections are going to be like. At least HDMI and/or DVI would be far superior to the VGA ports that most HDTVs opt to use.

[TerminX]

You can usually set what type of scaling you want to use in your video driver properties, at least on an NVIDIA card. You can choose between the monitor doing the scaling, the card doing the scaling, or scaling being disabled. If the scaling is disabled, the video output will be displayed in its original resolution with black bars on the top/bottom and left/right. The other options will typically stretch the image to fill the screen.

[avatar_58]

You can usually set what type of scaling you want to use in your video driver properties, at least on an NVIDIA card. You can choose between the monitor doing the scaling, the card doing the scaling, or scaling being disabled. If the scaling is disabled, the video output will be displayed in its original resolution with black bars on the top/bottom and left/right. The other options will typically stretch the image to fill the screen.

Of course then anything played in a resolution other than your native (1024x768 in games for instance) won't be scaled as well. So really its better to leave the pillarboxing to the DVD software.

[TerminX]

Of course then anything played in a resolution other than your native (1024x768 in games for instance) won't be scaled as well.
Er, that's exactly what I posted.

So really its better to leave the pillarboxing to the DVD software.
DVDs aren't going to be effected by the scaling option, because you don't go and change your desktop res to something non-native when you watch a movie. I thought it was clear that I was referring to the scaling of the entire output of the video card and not some kind of weird overlay scaling or whatever you're thinking of. My post was solely in reply to the games portion of his question, because that's the only part of it that involves running anything in a different resolution.

[avatar_58]

Actually thats my fault, I thought he was only asking about movies. My mistake.