Aspect ratio for 4:3 game on full screen.

A

Anthony2816

New member
I have a 1920 x 1200 monitor running off two HD 5870s, with the latest Catalyst drivers and control center.

I'm playing a game that's 4:3 when windowed, but when I change the game settings to full screen, it's getting distorted as it spreads to the entire screen.

I have a nVidia-run 1920 x 1200 laptop, and when I do the same thing on it, the full screen game displays as 4:3, with black bars on each side.

Is there no way to do this with my Radeons? There are settings for this in the laptop's nVidia control panel, but I can't find anything similar in the Catalyst Control Center.
 
Go to CCC, click "Desktops & Displays", there is a little monitor icon on the bottom left. Right click on the little monitor icon and go configure. Check the option labeled "Enable GPU Scaling" then select "Maintain Aspect Ratio."

Alternatively you can select "Use centered timings" which will display the image 1:1, so if you have an 800x600 image it will be a msall image in the middle of your screen 800x600 pixels.
 
Thanks for the reply, Demowhc. That took me to a screen I hadn't found previously...why do they keep it so well hidden?

However, when I check "Enable GPU scaling", the three options below it remain grayed-out, even after I click the "Apply" button.
 
does your monitor have scaling options? this would be best so it wouldnt matter what settings or what card you're on

otherwise, apparently, change your desktop resolution to something lower than native, now the options should be available, set them & go back to native
 
I'm not aware of any "scaling options", nor any other options, for my plug-n-play monitor. Where would I look for these?

Okay, within the CCC I tried setting changing my main monitor settings from 1920 x 1200 to 1680 x 1050. This indeed enabled the formerly grayed-out options.

However, no matter whether I selected "Maintain aspect ratio", "Scale image to full panel size", or "Use centered timings", when I switched the game to full screen, it appeared as a small 4:3 image in the middle of my monitor...not full screen.

And this hardly seems a solution anyway, since when not playing the game I certainly don't want my main monitor at otherwise than its 1920 x 1200 resolution, and I don't want to have to go back and forth to the CCC to toggle it back and forth...my nVidia laptop does this automatically.
 
no i think you just set it once & forget about it

i cant really... investigate this for you, as my options are not greyed out & never have been

so wait, now the image is correct aspect, just not stretching? which game is it?

for the monitor itself, just look around its on screen menu, but if you have a cheaper monitor, it might not have such options
 
Seems like its stuck on "Use centered Timings" for whatever reason. I'd lower the resolution again, disable then re-enable GPU scaling and put it back on maintain aspect ratio. Come to think of it I've had this issue before aswell, I think just after turning the options on and off I eventually got it to work.

And once its set you shouldnt have to touch it again, no need to "toggle back and forth"


Also note, depending on the resolution, aspect ratio and your monitor some resolutions may still stretch.
 
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Okay, I think I got it. As advised, I switched to 1650 x 1080, set it to Maintain Aspect Ratio, but instead of using CCC to go back to 1920 x 1200, I exited CCC and used Windows Display Properties to do it.

Why on earth would CCC require you to go to a non-native resolution to do this? Seems very unnecessary.
 
Anthony2816 said:
Okay, I think I got it. As advised, I switched to 1650 x 1080, set it to Maintain Aspect Ratio, but instead of using CCC to go back to 1920 x 1200, I exited CCC and used Windows Display Properties to do it.

Why on earth would CCC require you to go to a non-native resolution to do this? Seems very unnecessary.
Click to expand...

Although it doesn't bother me, as it's a one time setup, it seems like alot of people have wondered what the reasoning behind this is also and why they haven't changed it in many, many newer driver releases. All I can think is maybe they are relying on the monitor to scale and since you are at native, it wants no conflicts with the monitor.
 
I've had many monitors...Samsung, Hanns-G, Princeton, MAG, HP, etc., and never had one that had scaling functions like this. It's always been a function of the video card's signal *to* the monitor.
 
the only reason I can think of is that at native resolution you have no need to scale.

typically I think it is considered better to let your display do the scaling, but I guess it depends on how good it is wrt to distortions/latency.
 
Anthony2816 said:
I've had many monitors...Samsung, Hanns-G, Princeton, MAG, HP, etc., and never had one that had scaling functions like this. It's always been a function of the video card's signal *to* the monitor.
Click to expand...

Hrmm I have both monitors and HDTV's that have this scaling feature.

caveman-jim said:
the only reason I can think of is that at native resolution you have no need to scale.
Click to expand...

Thats what I was thinking aswell, but still it seems an odd design choice for the cat team.
 
like i said, cheaper ones dont have the options, so depending on what you use, you may or may not see the options

nicer ones, even years old, like dell WFP2407, my own, or others have scaling options, same for tvs

while my friend has a cheap dell E228WFP, which does NOT have scaling options
 
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