Can anyone explain resolution to me?

[ManBearPig]

So I figured out that, even though I can't run KotOR II at the native resolution for my laptop, it will for some reason accept 1280x768. Cool, great.

However, it has borders on all sides of the screen. Not cool. However, I can use the gpu options to stretch the screen, which is cool.

Here's my problem...why does it look better when there are borders on all sides of the screen than when I stretch it out? When I go to desktop, it seems like its changed the native resolution from 1440x900 to 1280x768 (which, because my laptop is retarded, I have to change later). So basically any time you use a resolution other than your native resolution, it makes the computer think the resolution you choose is the native resolution?

It has to be because I'm stretching the picture to fit the screen, but I dont get why. Can anyone explain this please?

Thanks. Hopefully this made sense!

 

[BrightCandle]

There are a couple of problems. One is the aspect ratio. 1280x768 is a 1.66666 ratio of horizontal pixels to vertical pixels, but your screens native 1440x900 is actually 1.6. So if you full screen it the image has to be unnaturally stretched by ~4%.

The second thing at play is that you are trying to draw (1280*768 / 1440*900)= 0.7585 pixels per pixel on your screen. How exactly would you like the screen to decide which of the pixels it repeats and which it doesn't? It has to use some sort of algorithm to do this and it doesn't have much time or processing power so instead the screen will do something simple that makes the image look somewhat blurry and potentially rather rubbish.

Given both types of problems its no wonder the image looks a little less than perfect. I would assume your GPU might do a better job of scaling than your screen if its supported, but its still not going to be all that great.

 

[supremor]

Why suffer a stretched image or black bars? heres a link with all the info you need to edit the game to accept any custom resolution of your choosing:

http://www.wsgf.org/dr/star-wars-knights-old-republic-ii-sith-lords

I used that to play KOTOR at 1920x1200 and it worked great so enjoy!

 

[ManBearPig]

It's a long explanation that I didn't feel like mentioning here since I'm lazy P), but basically with an intel gpu you can't use a modified exe. It will just crash. So that's uniws patcher changes the exe and it won't work. So annoying. At least, uniws won't work w/o a cracked exe, but all the cracked exes are v 2.0.0.0 or 2.2.0.0. The game exe I have is 2.1.0.0, but it's legit, not cracked, so it won't patch (uniws only works on cracked exes), but I suspect even if I found a cracked 2.1.0.0 and I could patch it, my game wouldn't load.

 

[supremor]

Well that's a shame. If it were me I would rather have black bars then over a stretched image.