widescreen gaming

Foehammer

ok, so i bought a dell 20 inch wide screen monitor and i cant get battlefield 2 to even launch, i've patched, i've updated drivers. uninstalled/re-installed video cards, iv'e tried the modifiying the bf2 shortcut and STILL nothing anyone else have this situation or know of anyone that has solved it? World of warcraft works great, bf2 ran great on my 19inch crt, but not on this thing at all. (3ds max in widescreen is beautiful by the way.) Help!

hawken

Us widescreen users still get the sharp end of the stick.

I plonk the windows startbar on the left of my screen, which still fucks up in every program. Open canvas doesn't support widescreen, like loads of other software.

Now that you have all that extra realestate, think about using mozilla's Thunderbird: you can do a 3 collumn layout (folders)|(headers)|(message)

Foehammer

i dont have any issues with the OS or just plain old surfing, (widescreen pron!!!! j/k) i just cant run ANY frickin games now, world of warcraft is assing itself now too, i may have to return this thing, but damn i dont want to it looks amazing

sledgy

Make sure you have a driver loaded for it, well more of just an .inf file for the device manager so Windows knows what it is. See if there are any utils to make it go into a standard (non-wide) mode.

Rwolf

Hmm is it possible for your to use your old monitor, for Dual Screen use? (use your old one for gaming and widescreend for desktop apps)

drakino

Odd, widescreen monitors in my experience haven't prevented a game from launching. Unless the monitoe doesn't support 1024x768, the typical default of games these days.

Battlefield 2 requires command line switches to run at widescreen. WoW for me just worked when I changed the resolution in game.

http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/ is a great resource to getting specific games to run in widescreen. Sadly with the modern enviornment of most "gamer laptops" going widescreen, games are still shipping with little to no out of box support.

If you want a quick and dirty way of setting game resolutions for WoW, Planetside, EQ1&2, Half Life 2, and Warhammer, check out a program I'm slowly working on, Game resolution switcher. Right now it's more for people who change monitors often (on the go gamers), but I'm looking to improve it over time to also be a quick way to set widescreen resolutions.

flaagan

somewhat along the same line.. any games anyone knows of that run (decently) across 2 screens?

Joshua Stubbles

across 2? No. My laptop runs at [email="1440@980"]1440@980[/email], though, no probs.

drakino

Foe, are you running an NVidia card? Just came across this suggestion on those widescreen boards:
.

Make sure your settings match and see if the game will run properly after that.

That might be the difference that is causing you greif, as my laptop has an ATI card in it.

hawken

ah yes I stumbled upon this screen thankfully, when Grimm Fandango was stretched across my screen.

KDR_11k

Flagaan: X2: The Threat has multi-monitor support. Takes up to three monitors at once. I heard it's pretty useful.

Foehammer

thanks for all your help guys, turns out the problem was with the latest ATI driver they released recently, i switched back to my old crt monitor and bf2 wouldn't launch and my screen had an unfixable green shade to it, i re-seated the vid card and re-verted to the old driver and it works beautifully, i hope my vid card isnt failing or dying on me, guess there is no way you can tell? anyways bf2 looks great on the widescreen, now i'll see about using the fix to actually get it to be formatted in widescreen. WOW runs great now also, i have none of the weird Tearing or other graphical problems i was having. (after dealing with this all weekend it makes me wanna check out an NVIDIA card)

KDR_11k

Naah, that's just Ati's excellent driver support, aka the reason I went with Nvidia now.

drakino

[ QUOTE ]
anyways bf2 looks great on the widescreen

[/ QUOTE ]

Well, apaprently not so great. Digging further on the widescreen boards, people have proven that the game actually crops the 4:3 view, instead of actually expanding your view point a bit. Basicially akin to a widescreen movie being made by cropping a full screen source. Bleh. Hopefully a patch will address this soon, without adding more memory leaks.

Regarding NVidia vs ATI... Well, video cards and drivers and the OS can have problems. Is one really better then the other? Not really. Both will likely give some owners some grief over time, no matter what company is behind it. I've seen friends with odd graphics issues on NVidia cards the same as I have seen on ATI cards.

Though I do get a good laugh when a game adds in a "Nsist on Nvidia" or some ATI logo, then goes on to fix an NVidia or ATI specific bug in the first patch.

KDR_11k

I don't think they'll widen your FOV on a widescreen, that'd be unfair.

Foehammer

i think it being unfair is debatable, sure it gives you a wider range of view but is that really an advantage? if you can't shoot you can't shoot, it's no different than the pilots with flight sticks vs the ones that dont have one, they have an advantage because they have a much better control system setup for flying, anyways, i've heard that you can edit a few files to get it BF2 to work in widescreen and to correct the POV in widescreen, i dont know if it works, i'll try it tonite, though i hear punkbuster may not like it (goes back to the advantage/disadvantage thing)

KDR_11k

You can spot attackers in a wider area. If you can't shoot you won't hit anything but if you can shoot and have a wider FOV than everybody else you can spot attackers more easily and get more shots in. Especially snipers often have trouble with their tunnel vision.

Foehammer

surround sound could be considered an unfair advantage also, and you can perform maneuvers on a stick that would be difficult if not impossible on a mouse setup, so yeah a widescreen does offer a slight advantage and if it was in an official tournament then that would be different