Monitor's native resolution is 1280x768, but able to play games in 1280 X 1024...What the heck?

[Capitalizt]

This is very weird...I installed the orange box today, and under resolution settings I was able to bump the games all the way up to 1280 by 1024 which looks VERY nice. The picture is perfectly sharp and it does appears to be running at that higher resolution (I'm used to running in 1280x720 or or1280x768 and can really see a difference.

My only question is...HOW THE HECK is this being accomplished? It the video card/game forcing my monitor to run at a higher resolution that it was designed for? The games certainly look better at this resolution...so is there any harm in keeping it?

 

[jmmtn4aj]

What monitor?

 

[Capitalizt]

It's a 32 inch Olevia LCD TV. The native resolution is actually something weird like 1366x768, but I've never been able to get it to run at that rez. 1280x768 is the best I can usually do for the desktop and gaming.

 

[Dkcode]

Set the aspect ratio in the video options to 16:9

 

[TheOtherRizzo]

You need to run your monitor at it's native resolution if you want to improve the quality. 1280 x 1024, 1280 x 720 and 1280 x 768 all get resized to 1366 x 768 by the electronics inside your monitor. This is why your screen is always blurry. To get your PC to output 1366 x 768 you may need to add it to your driver as a custom resolution. Nvidia drivers can do this, for ATI cards you need Powerstrip.

And I don't see a reason why 1280 x 1024 should look better than 1280 x 768 on your monitor. Probably you just like the distorted Aspect Ratio for some twisted reason.

 

[kmmatney]

I have a 50" plasma with a VGA cable connected to a computer, and it took me several hours to finally get the windows desktop to run at 1366 x 768. I could run at 1024 x 768 with bars on the side, but it ages to get the widescreen working with an Ati video card. No chance of getting that to work in most games, though.

I think the only reason why 1280 x 1024 might look better , is that somehow the monitor is able to scale that resolution better than the others. It would probably look best at native resolution, but good luck trying to get that the work in games. I'll try it one mine and see how it looks.