Question about Nec 20WGX2 (Pro)

[Raptor051]

Hi,

as I see it the "best" all around monitor is wide Nec LCD 20WGX2 (pro?) and I am looking to it, but with his resolution 1680x1050 how will it display older games and applications with fixed lower 4:3 resolution (i.e. Heroes 3 800x640) or games that are not supporting 1680x1050 (i.e. HoMMV). I so that some of you here have exactly that monitor so I won?t your opinion about that...
Or should I look for "normal" 4:3 LCD (as there is no good CRT anymore) that have 8bit color, good for gaming and occasional movie watching. Which one?


PS I know that a picture will be little out of focus and/or blurred if is not in native LCD resolution but I don?t wont stretched and/or distorted picture.

Thx

sorry about posting in wrong place....

 

[Engraver]

I have that monitor but have never used it at anything other than native. Depending on what video card you use, you should be able to disable the stretch to fit at lower resolutions it they are too out of whack for your tastes.

 

[LittleNemoNES]

I don't play any old games but just about every game has a work-around for widescreen or supports it natively.

I have a 20wmgx2 and on image quality alone I don't regret anything.

 

[waxor]

Raptor, I just bought a 20WMGX2 myself recently, about a week and a half ago. I wasn't aware of the widescreen issues until I started trying to run some old games (>2/3 years).

You'll definitely run into problems if you try to play a lot of older games. It can be a true PITA if you can't stand the stretching. Driver support is so-so. ATI drivers I cannot get to stop stretching, even with omega drivers and all kinds of other tweaks. I've heard NVIDIA drivers have better support for disabling stretching, but I don't have any experience with them on this monitor.

Check out http://www.widescreengamingforum.com to see if a game has a workaround.

So basically, if you don't mind having stretch on some games you'll be fine.. otherwise you may want to consider a native 4:3 screen.

Personally I play Warcraft 3 mostly. This does not support widescreen or 4:3 with bars. So I'm forced to stretch. It's not too bad actually, and I'm used to it at this point. The awesome quality of the screen more than make up for it in my mind.

As another example, my wife plays the sims 2, which has a workaround that works decently. But it requires manually setting the resolution every time you run the game and some config file editting to get the 1680x1050 resolution to even show up in the settings menu. Also, it ends up cutting off the screen on the top and bottom. It is more of a zoom than true widescreen, unfortunately.

 

[hans007]

nvidia drivers can stop the stretching i think. i think there is a setting in there too (i know i've run 800x600 on it, in a black framed window).

 

[CP5670]

If the games are old enough to run in a very low resolution (640x480 or 800x600), you might be able to connect the monitor by VGA and use its size/position controls to "unstretch" the image back to the right size. Many monitors have these controls accessible on VGA but not DVI, and at such low resolutions there won't be any image quality reduction due to VGA. I do this on my 90GX2, although it's a 5:4 monitor and there isn't a big adjustment needed to get it to show 4:3.