Monitor issue

**Lysimachus** · December 25, 2010, 01:00 PM

OK, so today for Christmas I got a 23" monitor which i've happily installed. Now while using the 1920x1080 resolution is nice, for games where I have to run it at smaller resolutions (or want to), the screen looks kind of stretched. Is there any way of making it so the screen is in the middle with simply a black area around it?

**Ishan** · December 25, 2010, 01:24 PM

Not that i know of so

**TNZ** · December 25, 2010, 02:48 PM

I would have thought you should be able to do that through your video card’s control panel.

**irishron** · December 25, 2010, 04:09 PM

Which games are we talking about?

**Lysimachus** · December 25, 2010, 04:14 PM

M2TW, RTW, ETW, Zeus: Master of Olympus, Knights of Honor, Battles in Normandy and probably more.

**Big Boss** · December 25, 2010, 04:47 PM

I'm not familiar with the other games, but why do you want to play the TW games at a lower resolution?

**Lysimachus** · December 25, 2010, 04:52 PM

Because playing at high resolution decreases the amount of FPS in-game, and Stainless Steel is already taxing enough on my GPU (an average Geforce 9800GT) on lower levels. I was hoping if there was a way for me to play at 1280x1024 without it stretching across the screen

**Ishan** · December 25, 2010, 05:01 PM

You can play M2TW in windowed mode and make the window as small as you want.

**Lysimachus** · December 25, 2010, 05:09 PM

does the FPS then get affected according to the resolution, or does windowed mode have its own FPS?

**Nanny de Bodemloze** · December 26, 2010, 08:03 AM

The higher the resolution, the less fps...the amount depends on the individual setup/machine/game. Windowed mode reduces fps a bit from full screen.

I ran into this problem with NWN, and, non-sensically,I was able to fix the messed up aspect ratio by changing the resolution in windows before loading the game, compensating for the in-game video stretch by choosing a squished res in windows...In theory, that shouldn't have worked, but it did for older games.

**Ishan** · December 26, 2010, 08:14 AM

Originally Posted by Lysimachus

does the FPS then get affected according to the resolution, or does windowed mode have its own FPS?

You set the lower resolution option and then exit and launch the game in windowed mode the window will be automatically open up small on that resolution, so giving you more fps.

Originally Posted by Nanny de Bodemloze

Windowed mode reduces fps a bit from full screen.

Yes i have noticed that also, in fullscreen atleast for ATI i know the PC then uses the G.card at top gear.

And for Xfire guys it's stupid to play at windowed mode and the second GPU stays at rest or idle and only jumps when running in fullscreen mode.

So all those benchmarks like 3d mark etc run in fullscreen mode so that makes sense on why.