Gaming at 21:9 aspect ratio

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dan0543

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dan0543
Hi guys
I've found myself extremely tempted to get myself a 21:9 2560x1080 ips panel monitor for the purpose of gaming, but I'm not sure whether it's a sensible thing to do. I think only a handful of modern games support it, and I don't know whether it will be well supported and adopted in the future. It's a shame, because I've only heard good words about the immersion it gives, but it seems that not many games support it at all.:indiff:
I'm sure I could run games at 1920x1080 resolution and still find use for the extra space left, but do you think many games will offer fullscreen support for 21:9 in the future?
 
It depends, what do you want to play? I imagine it's a really good compromise between the massive FOV you get with triple monitors but without bezels. Then again you don't get any wrapping either so the fisheye effect would be quite a lot more pronounced.

The thing is, all games work differently and not many of the mainstream ones acknowledge anything other than 16:9. Sims usually have the best support for unusual resolutions, so if you do any simming you'll probably love it.
 
Well afaik Philips are the only one making 21:9 resolution right ? If it's the case, I doubt there's gonna be more support coming for that type of screen.
 
TB
Forget those little 29" 21:9 screens and go for a 58" instead. :P
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This model was on sale recently for half price at my local Costco. They're having some trouble selling them since very little home media currently supports this format.

I'd imagine it would make for a great digital workspace though.
 
neema_t
So what kind of games do you normally play?
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all sorts really, not had my pc for too long, about 6 months. tried everything from wow and league of legends to borderlands, skyrim and bioshock infinite, and call of duty when my freinds don't take no for an answer and spam me on skype. Not really played much racing sims though, i tend to use gt5 for that. Don't play as much now, but I've got a DFGT that I can attach to my desk.

So you think this type of screen would be best suited to racing sims? I'm just looking at iracing and simraceway's website, but I cant find anything that says they support 21:9 ratio.

@TB, yeah, that would be something :drool:
shame about my desk size, let alone the size of the room and whether it will get through the door :lol:
 
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With dual and triple displays becoming more common place, custom resolutions are more common than they used to be. I would think that support would be very good. You may have to make .ini or .cfg edits for certain games but I would be surprised if support for your custom "native" resolutions wouldn't be supported for most games.

*purely speculation on my part*
 
Pako
With dual and triple displays becoming more common place, custom resolutions are more common than they used to be. I would think that support would be very good. You may have to make .ini or .cfg edits for certain games but I would be surprised if support for your custom "native" resolutions wouldn't be supported for most games.

*purely speculation on my part*
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UT2004 is a good example,

It doesn't support 1920x1080, you have to edit the ini files to force it to work.
 
dan0543
all sorts really, not had my pc for too long, about 6 months. tried everything from wow and league of legends to borderlands, skyrim and bioshock infinite, and call of duty when my freinds don't take no for an answer and spam me on skype. Not really played much racing sims though, i tend to use gt5 for that. Don't play as much now, but I've got a DFGT that I can attach to my desk.

So you think this type of screen would be best suited to racing sims? I'm just looking at iracing and simraceway's website, but I cant find anything that says they support 21:9 ratio.
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You probably won't find any game that lists every resolution it can run at, it's all quite hit and miss. I imagine a 21:9 monitor would be less flexible than a triple monitor setup because when a game refuses to co-operate with the resolution you can just turn Surround/Eyefinity off and it'll work, so there's a possibility that as you can't 'turn the aspect ratio off' there will be some games that just flat out refuse to work regardless of the resolution you choose. Honestly I'd probably just wait and see what happens and if you're desperate for a monitor now I'd buy a 16:9 one because you're pretty much guaranteed that all games will work on it. If you'd said you want to do some simming I would've said it's not an issue, but if you play more console-ported games than anything else buying an exotic monitor like a 21:9 is a bit of a risk, in my opinion anyway.
 
OK, so just out of curiosity I had a fiddle with a few display settings on my current screen.
I have a 1920 x 1080 monitor hooked up for now, which I use as a TV in the living room, and my aim was to try and find out if any game could run at 2560x1080.
I created a custom resolution of 2560x1080 through my nvidia control panel, and tried to launch a game (kingdoms of amalur the reckoning). All that happened was the game displayed at 1920x1080 and i couldn't change to 2560x1080 in the resolution settings in game.
So then went into the local files of the game, and in the personal settings document I changed the horizontal resolution to 2560 instead of 1920. So I loaded up the game, looked in the resolution settings and the option had appeared to use 2560 x 1080. I continued the game from where I last left off, and it played perfectly at the new resolution.
So is this some happy accident, or is it quite easy to make any game run at 2560 x 1080? If so, then there's no reason not to get a new 21:9 monitor.👍
 
You're running 2560x1080 on one 1920x1080 monitor? Or do you mean you're playing on two monitors?
 
running one 1920 x1080 monitor. obviously it looks compressed to fit horizontally, but it was just for testing purposes.
 
Oh right, I get you, I thought you were being very, very strange. Yeah, that doesn't work for every game but it probably works for more games than it doesn't, if you get what I mean. I find the older the game is, the more resolutions it supports because in recent years ports have gotten lazier and lazier so if you have anything exotic it causes problems. Some games even consider 16:10 as being unusual, Ghiost Recon Future Solider, for example, tells me I'm running at 1680x1050 (16:10) but you can tell by the way things are sort of weirdly scaled, the way the text looks broken up and the black bars at the top and bottom that it's downscaling 1920x1050 to my resolution, at 16:9... I find it's usually Ubisoft games that have these problems because they seem completely incapable of hiring developers who can nail the absolute basics that almost any other developer/publisher gets right every time, even indie games don't have these problems. Anyway, whatever.

This might interest you, it's from a Rock Paper Shotgun Week in Tech post:

I’ve also had a little play with one of the new generation of ultra-wide PC monitors. I’m talking 29 inches, 21:9 aspect ratio and 2,560 by 1,080 pixels. As far as I know, they’re all using the same IPS panel, at a guess made by LG. So they should all look fairly similar.

The basic image quality of the Philips effort I reviewed is rather lovely as you’d expect from a modern IPS panel. And it’s hilariously, bizarrely wide. An obvious observation, but these things really are pretty dramatic.

They’re great for feature films, obviously. It’s nice to see all four corners of the display filled for once. But PC monitors, frankly, are piss poor value if watching movies is the main concern.

What they’re not great for is normal PC fare. Vertical res really counts for pedestrian stuff like browsing the web, and you’ve got no more than a basic 22-inch panel. Instead you get loads of what is often superfluous width.

Philips%2021%209.jpg

Wider than two extremely wide things. In a pod.

These new 29 inchers also beg the question of what’s too wide for comfort. Actually reading text located at the extremities of the panel feels distinctly sub optimal to me.

But whether 21:9 works for games is the really interesting question. Currently, I don’t have the answer. I thought it was a hell of a lot of fun. But I also fear the novelty factor and when it will wear off. There are practicality concerns when it comes to on-screen menus, too. It could work really well. It could be ridiculous depending on how you like things set up and how configurable a given game is.

It’s also worth noting this brave new 29-inch gen is pretty aggressively priced. A little under £400 appears to be the norm. OK, that’s hardly throw away money, but it’s just attainable enough to be interesting. I’ve probably gone mad and these things are a passing fad. But I can’t deny it. I found superwide gaming strangely compelling. Would I actually buy one? Nope.
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thanks for that, everybody seems to think they work well for gaming. There's an asus 29" monitor thats coming that could be interesting, i saw it on youtube on techtommorow's channel. The representative says it should retail for $599 in the US, which translates to about £390 before the british taxes are added to it, and they're aiming to release it Q2 this year.
I think the LG model would be better for gaming as it has a 5ms response time while the dell has 8ms, but I'll wait to see how the asus one looks before I buy one I think.
 
I know this is a super old thread, but was wondering if Neema_t could explain further to me about Sims supporting a 21:9 resolution. I'm getting a ultra wide monitor today and needing to know what I need to do to play Sims 3 in 21:9 resolution.
 
ChelleJo
I know this is a super old thread, but was wondering if Neema_t could explain further to me about Sims supporting a 21:9 resolution. I'm getting a ultra wide monitor today and needing to know what I need to do to play Sims 3 in 21:9 resolution.
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Hi @ChelleJo, I meant 'sims', as in flight or driving simulations because they usually support all kinds of weird resolutions. I have no idea if The Sims 3 supports 21:9 resolutions, sorry.
 
Thank you! I did get the monitor today and Sims 3 is supported (In case anyone else every needs to know)... no special things needed.

Thank you for taking the time to respond, Neema_t! :)
 

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