I duplicate my displays from my monitor to my tv so my tv has to project 1680x1050 because that's what my monitor can handle then I use my tv settings to stretch the screen to make it full screen. When I play a game on the tv it has these skinny black bars on the top and bottom and it doesn't look as nice as if it were full screen on the tv.
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Set your TV to 720/1080p in your graphic control panel, they don't have to have the same resolution.
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You should get a program called Ultramon then. It allows you to quickly switch your primary monitor.
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It's hard to do that because when I make my TV my main display, my wireless mouse and keyboard can't work from the living room because of its short range so I have to keep going back and forth to move my mouse to the big picture button to press it.
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You can try focusing on the program you wish you move to the second monitor, and press Shift+Windows button+left/right arrow on the keyboard, this does not work with all programs and games, but some do.
Also useful for when Windows decides to move a window to the second monitor, and you want to move it back to the main screen.
Running games in windowed mode helps if you want to use the hotkey command.
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I play mirror's edge and I set the resolution to 1680x1050 and I think this is one of the only games that does this, also big picture has black bars too. Also when you stetch it to hide the black bars it looks normal actually :) Like when I duplicate my screen to my tv and I stretch it to make it full everything looks fine still.
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Your screenshots show that you're missing nothing visually. It's not changing your FOV to compensate.
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Proud 16:10 user here, 1680 x 1050 and 1440 x 900 on my laptop. I'm also eying a fantastic 1920 x 1200 Dell for my next purchase. 16:10 is dead, long live 16:10!
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I got myself a, HP w2338h. Runs at 1920x1200.
A family member asked me if I had a 1080p monitor. I said no. They said, "Get one, it'll be the highest detail you've ever seen!"
They didn't understand that 1080p means it's lower detail than my 1200p monitor. This person's wife still hates it when they chop off the top and bottom of her widescreen DVDs.
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In my opinion stretching is much worse than black bars.
What's the problem with bars? If a game forces 16:9, therefore creates black bars, you have the same image like people with 16:9 monitors do (meaning "not worse" image).
Stretching the image results in a distortion of the image - vertical distances are not equivalent to horizontal ones. Any movement or distances in-game would be difficult to evaluate because of that.
I never understood people who played Warcraft III (which supports 4:3 only) on 16:9 monitors stretched. Characters moved horizontally much faster then vertically. Mindfu*k...
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I also use that resolution (or other 16:10) resolutions and I've noticed Mirror's Edge does that. There is a setting in the graphics driver control panel (Nvidia) to force stretching, but I haven't actually tried it.
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The games are anamorphic. They'll force a 16:9 letterboxed (the black bars you describe are commonly called letterboxing) aspect ratio regardless of your chosen resolution or anything else. They're intended to be like that and there's no way to get around it.
A monitor with a resolution of 1920x1080 (1080P) is already 16:9 so the game doesn't need to letterbox because the monitor is built to the aspect ratio it wants. A 16:10 monitor like yours (I still use the same by the way) will ALWAYS letterbox an anamorphic game like Mirror's Edge.
It's pretty common for a console port to be anamorphic.
Just for interest's sake there are also 2 other common ways of handling other aspect ratios. Hor+ will increase the field of vision to the sides the wider your resolution (most games that aren't anamorphic are Hor+ and it's generally considered the best method). Vert- "crops" an image at the top and bottom the wider your resolution is. For example in Mass Effect 4:3 is the original intended aspect ratio and the resolution at which everything is displayed. Then at 16:10 the legs get cropped shorter and you can see less at the top of the game. Then 16:9 hugely crops the game where a huge chunk of the game and the character's entire legs are cropped off. Vert- was the aspect ratio change method that was first used when games became widescreen but thankfully it's pretty much never used any more since the way it achieves the change (cropping off almost half the game from 4:3 to 16:9) is so un-optimal.
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I put 1680x1050 on my 1080p tv and I stretch it with tv options and it looks fine :) except that since the game is running at 1680x1050 it still put the letterboxing. Yeah I can stretch it even more to cover up the letterboxing but then when I play games where it's not letterboxed I have to change the settings again to unstretch it.
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It might look fine to you but you're essentially breaking the way things are meant to look. You're literally stretching things out of proportion. Take any random image you want, even porn, and stretch it 20% vertically and that's exactly the same as what you're wanting to do. It's not something you should ever do since it will affect your perception of the game far more than the minimal bars added by anamorphic letterboxing, and might even make you worse at it.
And no there is no hack. A potential trick would be to set a 16:9 resolution which for your monitor would be 1600x900. And then disable scaling in your graphics card control panel (scaling is letterboxing in GPU terms, at least for nVidia). Note that this would stretch ALL games to your entire monitor at all times, so even a 800x600 4:3 game would get stretched. But theoretically since the resolution is at 16:9 the game wouldn't know that you're actually viewing it fully at another resolution. That's just a theory though and it may not work. And if it doesn't then there really is absolutely no way of altering an anamorphic game.
I definitely don't recommend doing that though.
Trust me man you'll get used to anamorphic games being letterboxed pretty quickly.
And just imagine if you tried to do this to a 2.35:1 movie like for instance Avengers, you'd completely ruin it. And the letterboxes in such a case are far more annoying than the ones when just going from 16:9 to 16:10.
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If you stretch 16:9 to fit 16:10, it'll turn every square into a rectangle, and every circle into an oval. It's not as bad as stretching a 4:3 to fit a widescreen, but it's still horribly noticeable if you get used to the proper unstretched, undistorted aspect ratio.
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my current secondary monitor which was previously my main monitor is 16:10 but I only encountered black bar issues once or twice.
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It's not an issue but rather a technique.
Tell me would you rather see the exact same amount of the game as someone else playing on a screen with a wider aspect ratio than yours? Or would you rather see horizontally less? Because the answer to those questions is anamorphic VS Hor+.
Personally whilst I like having the whole screen filled with no bars I'd much rather see the whole game than a little less than someone with a wider aspect ratio.
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My monitor is 16:10 and I play on 1680x1050 and I get black bars on the top and bottom on some games and I don't like it. Is there a program to automatically stretch the screen to get rid of the black bars? When I'm on big picture on 1080p screen the black bars disappear. I experience this with mirror's edge.
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