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| | | Thursday, January 17, 2008 |  | Widescreen vs Pan and Scan PC Gaming
By John @ 4:21 PM :: 8012 Views :: 14 Comments ::  :: Tech Knowledge |  | On tkArena we want to provide test results and benchmarks that relate common real-world scenarios of our readers. There’s no point testing at 2560 x 2048 resolution if hardly anyone has monitors that support it. What relevance does that have to system performance? Yes, it can demonstrate that you can bottleneck the video card at that resolution and it might show that one video card is faster than the other when you bottleneck them at that resolution, but it has no real-world relevance to the average user. The purpose of this article is two fold. Firstly, I wanted to investigate the differences between widescreen (16:9) and pan and scan (4:3) aspect ratios. Widescreen monitors are becoming more popular, but what games support it and does it actually give you any gameplay advantages? Secondly, I wanted to explain to our readers why we test at the resolutions we do. When we test we want to simulate what people are using in real life and look to what they might be looking at using in the near future. I have used the ongoing survey from Steam to guide me. 
Throughout this article I have referred to widescreen as 16:9. This is because that is the aspect ratio commonly used when selecting widescreen in popular games. As seen in this screenshot from Quake 4, widescreen is referred to as 16:9 ratio. Steam also refer to widescreen as 16:9 even though technically, this is mathematically incorrect for most resolutions. |
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| Comments |  By
concerned @
Friday, January 18, 2008 2:45 PM | |
the credibility of this article to me has been greatly reduced due to the fact that it refers to widescreen aspect ratios as 16:9 instead of 16:10 |
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| ByJohn gatt @
Friday, January 18, 2008 3:46 PM | |
You might want to go to http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html and see what they use let me tell you it’s not 16:10. As Steam is where I got my figures from Ill stick to it yes there is 16:10 but it’s not what I was testing. |
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| By
badu @
Friday, January 18, 2008 5:27 PM |
Interesting article, thanks.
Concerning the Steam page, I'm pretty sure they just mislabeled it as 16:9... if you look under primary display resolutions, there's not a single 16:9 resolution on there. The page was probably written for console stats originally. |
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| By
not a n00b like you @
Friday, January 18, 2008 6:39 PM | |
all those resolutions are either 4:3, 5:4(1280x1024) or 16:10 (1920x1200 is 16:10, 1920x1080 is 16:9). Just cus steam made a typo doesn't mean you have to repeat it does it? Poor article. |
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| By
John Gatt @
Friday, January 18, 2008 6:40 PM | |
All the Valve games box out the game to 16:9 (Black line at top and bottom) Yes the desktop is 16:10 when set to 1680X1050 but most of the games are played at 16:9 as the game dose not use the full hight of the monitor. |
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| By
notan00b @
Friday, January 18, 2008 6:46 PM |
No, thats wrong, I have a 2560x1600 30" Dell 3007WFP-HC so I can say for a fact all steam games display 16:10 correctly (HL2 games anyway). Please look here for a description of how it does it, they also cover other games.
http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/wiki/index.php/Half-Life_series
Sorry to flame, but you are incorrect. |
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| By
mGuy @
Friday, January 18, 2008 7:06 PM | |
Good article, thanks. This was exactly the info I was looking for when I was shopping for a new lcd - is a widescreen an advantage in fps. |
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| By
John @
Friday, January 18, 2008 7:22 PM |
Screen shot of id calling it 16:9 too.
http://www.tkarena.com/Portals/0/quake4%202008-01-19%2006-04-39-61.jpg
Yes I know 1680x1050 is 16:10 but Games have referd to widescreen as 16:9 for as long as I can remember. Ill put a note in the artical about it :)
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| By
tompee @
Monday, January 21, 2008 9:06 AM |
I foresee the next trend, after everyone has wide screens in 5 years time.
It will be "tall screens", in an amazing new 4:3 ratio, and there will be screenshots where on the wide screen you lose sight of what is at the top and at the bottom of the image, but on a "tall screen" you get to see everything, and it will be amazing! |
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| By
Random5 @
Monday, January 21, 2008 10:47 AM | |
Actually Steam games (Source engine that is) offer 4:3 (which does include the 1280x1024 5:4 res), 16:10 resolutions and 16:9 resolutions. There is a list in video options of which aspect ratio you want! Most people run in 16:10 as there are more monitors for it and since you don't make much mention of ACTUAL 16:9 resolutions you should have said 16:10 |
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| By
Random5 @
Monday, January 21, 2008 10:53 AM | |
tompee, you're missing something here... our eyes are better looking left to right than they are up and down for one thing, and our field of vision is much wider than it is high anyway. Widescreen monitors better fill your vision... if a 4:3 monitor was filling your entire vision you'd miss out things at the top and bottom. A 16:X monitor can almost perfectly fill your field of vision, immersing you in the game or movie more throughly. |
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| By
richiemccann @
Monday, January 21, 2008 1:49 PM | |
Your note about Bioshock is actually incorrect. the game was developed for widescreen. To avoid the 4:3 ratio losing the atmosphere that the developers wanted to give, the 4:3 version actually ADDS the top and the bottom of the image rather than removing it for widescreen gameplay. Details here: http://au.xbox360.ign.com/articles/814/814960p1.html |
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| ByEags @
Tuesday, January 22, 2008 11:48 AM |
To set the record straight:
Movies and TV's have a 16:9 aspect ratios. The screens for displaying them are called 'widescreen'. The term 16:9 describes the ratio and was interchangable with 'widescreen'
UNTIL computer monitors started to become popular, however they came in a slightly different resolution ratio...that of 16:10.
But they LOOK the same as the TV screens right? So people still used the term 16:9, even though its now incorrect.
To the author, this is teh interweb.
Please update your atricle to remove 16:9 and replace it with 16:10. You are tangling the series of tubes and Mr Gore is un-impressed! |
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| By
Jeffro @
Sunday, February 10, 2008 10:56 PM |
OOOH get a life
Quibling over numbers which not a lot of people can reach is inconsequential!!!!
I have an AMD quad 9500 based machine feeding a 8800gts graphics card on a HP LP3065 (thats worth looking up) and the top resolution on that possible is 2560 x 1600 and yes I can run all my games including Witcher at that resolution.
BUT
why are you worrying about larger resolutions when they are not available?
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