Aspect ratios, games and LCDs

[Skipper007]

I know someone who's thinking of going LCD with their new machine, and due to the screen size selections, likely something with either a 5:4 or 16:10 aspect ratio. How difficult is it to get games up and running with a non-standard aspect ratio LCD? I'm praticularly interested in what happens when you need to run at a lower res to reduce GPU load (he's going to have this rig for a while, I would think)... with 4:3, you can drop from say, 1280X960 to 800X600. But I don't know of any 5:4 ratios below 1280X1024, and while there is 854X480 for widescreens, that's a 16:9 res, not a 16:10 one. Also, say he got something like a 1440X900 19 inch... would he have to use hacks to get 1280X800 working? Because while he's not a noob, he's not as computer literate as me.

As a side question, there are three main issues I know of with LCDs: refresh rates, upscaling, and colour reproduction. Refresh rates... I'll just say that I haven't found it an issue in recent years, and I don't think he'll have much of a problem with it either. But I'm very concerned at how LCDs look at non-native res and how the colour reproduction stuff is. I've seen some very good looking LCDs, but is this stuff highly model dependent? If you're wondering what specific models he's looking at, he'd probably be looking at an Acer or Samsung because the local prices and stock for those tend to be the best, 19-22inch widescreen.

 

[zzz]

Yes, color reproduction is model dependent. The panel type has a lot to do with that. See this thread.

Many newer games support various widescreen resolutions, but there will be limitations. This is a good site related to it.

Finally, widescreen monitors often stretch the image if a 4:3 game is being run on them, and you can always counteract that and retain the right aspect ratio using this solution.