Does anyone Still use 5:4 / 4:3 aspect ratios nowadays?

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Expand view Topic review: Does anyone Still use 5:4 / 4:3 aspect ratios nowadays?

Re: Does anyone Still use 5:4 / 4:3 aspect ratios nowadays?

by Zen3001 » Sun Aug 12, 2018 9:39 am

I do at times, prefer widescreen most of the time but it just looks cool and sometimes ends up being the only option to save performance

Re: Does anyone Still use 5:4 / 4:3 aspect ratios nowadays?

by NiGHTMARE » Thu Jul 26, 2018 12:27 pm

Spoiler:
The Way It's (Not) Meant To Be Played (TM): 4k on a 55" TV, via the wonders of Fire TV and Moonlight.

(Please excuse the mess! :))

Re: Does anyone Still use 5:4 / 4:3 aspect ratios nowadays?

by The Ultimate DooMer » Mon Jul 23, 2018 3:08 am

My desktop is 1280x1024 (with an old 15" flatscreen), and I always run GZDoom in a window (currently 1152x864) due to it's lifelong refusal to alt+tab properly.

Re: Does anyone Still use 5:4 / 4:3 aspect ratios nowadays?

by Chris » Sat Jul 21, 2018 6:59 pm

If I'm playing a game like Doom, my focus is going to be on the game. Just because something may be physically visible on the screen doesn't mean you're actually seeing it. Tunnel vision is a real thing.

Personally, I have the game in a window, and use something notably larger than 800x600. My 1440x900 monitor is fairly small by today's standards (it's not even 1080p!), and I play GZDoom in a 1280x720 window. Gives a nice "standard def" resolution that covers most of the screen, leaving a little space at the edges I can see and click on. But most importantly, It leaves the taskbar visible at the bottom of the screen, so if something needs my attention (someone mentioned me in chat, etc), the taskbar will flash which is often good enough to distract me from the game (and if it's not, having a smaller game window wouldn't help; it might in fact make it harder since I'll have to focus more on the game window because the area is smaller). I don't need the other windows themselves wholly visible, the task bar and systray work just fine to show alerts and notifications, and if I notice something important, I can quickly pause the game and click away to see what's up.

Re: Does anyone Still use 5:4 / 4:3 aspect ratios nowadays?

by Trusty McLegit » Sat Jul 21, 2018 6:47 pm

As for monitor I've currently got a 1080p 144hz, looking to upgrade to 4k 144hz gsync in the next few years. I usually play DOOM with the full screen HUD at 16:9, but whenever I want to play with the Statusbar I always switch to 4:3. 4:3 with Statusbar is perfect in my opinion, not sure what aspect ratio the game ends up being at that point, but it's wider than 4:3 but not as wide as 16:9.

I occasionally play bullet hell games that allow you to play in portrait mode, and every time I turn my monitor vertically it surprises me just how wide 16:9 really is

Re: Does anyone Still use 5:4 / 4:3 aspect ratios nowadays?

by Sgt. Shivers » Sat Jul 21, 2018 5:11 pm

Graf Zahl wrote:Why? It's pure torture for me.
I like to have the whole game in a window so i can see everything at once.

Re: Does anyone Still use 5:4 / 4:3 aspect ratios nowadays?

by phantombeta » Sat Jul 21, 2018 4:30 pm

Graf Zahl wrote:Why? It's pure torture for me.

Recently I had to install some stuff where the installer was some broken piece of shit that only worked on Windows 9x. So I had to get a Windows 98 VM to unpack the thing and copy it elsewhere.
And as it just so happened that VM ran at 800x600 and nothing higher. It was an utter hassle to get anything done on that tiny screen.

No, the bigger a monitor is, the better.
Such is the problem with getting more screen space. It always feels awful and cramped to use a computer or monitor with less screen space. :P

Re: Does anyone Still use 5:4 / 4:3 aspect ratios nowadays?

by Graf Zahl » Sat Jul 21, 2018 4:26 pm

Why? It's pure torture for me.

Recently I had to install some stuff where the installer was some broken piece of shit that only worked on Windows 9x. So I had to get a Windows 98 VM to unpack the thing and copy it elsewhere.
And as it just so happened that VM ran at 800x600 and nothing higher. It was an utter hassle to get anything done on that tiny screen.

No, the bigger a monitor is, the better.

Re: Does anyone Still use 5:4 / 4:3 aspect ratios nowadays?

by Sgt. Shivers » Sat Jul 21, 2018 4:23 pm

I use 800x600 when I can.

Re: Does anyone Still use 5:4 / 4:3 aspect ratios nowadays?

by Blzut3 » Sat Jul 21, 2018 3:15 pm

Until very recently I ran 3x1600x1200 IPS. One of my monitors has a bad capacitor so I replaced it with a 2560x1440 144Hz IPS Freesync display which I now use for gaming because between the lower latency and the higher refresh rate it just feels a lot nicer. Although given the awkward positioning of the monitor on my desk due to its size I sometimes still game on the 1600x1200 displays. Not holding my breath that NEC will ever include high refresh rates and adaptive sync into their 4:3 displays so I imagine the days of 4:3 for me are numbered. With all that said I always game windowed and generally use 16:9 anyway for the greater fov.

Also my laptop has a 1400x1050 IPS screen and was retrofitted with a modern (Broadwell) motherboard.

Re: Does anyone Still use 5:4 / 4:3 aspect ratios nowadays?

by Graf Zahl » Sat Jul 21, 2018 2:35 pm

TDRR wrote:I have an Acer 5:4 monitor and a laptop with 16:9, but the one i prefer to use is the 5:4 monitor.
And every Cyber Cafe and House i have went to uses 4:3/5:4 and my specific resolution is 800x600 (crappy igpu) so yes, 5:4/4:3 is still kinda popular.
What kinds of cyber cafés are that which run on such stone age hardware? Where I live they'd have to close due to lack of customers.
I cannot even remember when was the last time I have SEEN a 4:3 or 5:4 monitor. Wherever I go, it's TFT 16:9 or 16:10, and nothing else.

Re: Does anyone Still use 5:4 / 4:3 aspect ratios nowadays?

by Chris » Sat Jul 21, 2018 7:51 am

In these days of LCDs and the like, changing the resolution for fullscreen is pretty much useless. LCDs have a fixed resolution, and when you "change" the resolution, you're just having the monitor accept a smaller image for display that it stretches to fill the screen. There's little advantage to having the monitor do this scaling, but a good number of advantages to allowing the graphics card/app do it. With the app doing the stretching via hardware, it prevents issues with the desktop resizing, throwing your desktop icons or other windows out of whack to fit a new size. With the app doing it, you can also get the option to retain the correct aspect ratio of the image, adding letterboxing or pillarboxing as needed (monitors I've seen all use stretch-to-fill, which destroys the pixel aspect ratio).

Additionally, most games these days render to offscreen framebuffers and don't write to the window/screen backbuffer until after post-processing has been handled. That write to the backbuffer can incorporate the necessary stretching, after all the hard work has been done, which also has the important implication of allowing "dynamic resolution". Since the pixel shaders and fill rate of drawing the scene encompass a large percentage of the game's rendering time, the game can keep a running profile of how long it took to draw a frame, and if it saw it took longer than desirable, the next frame can render to a smaller portion of its offscreen framebuffer and adjust the scaling metrics accordingly (fewer pixels=faster frame rendering). The intention being that rather than scene complexity causing the framerate to drop, it instead reduces the internal render resolution by some percentage, adding a slight scaling blur (not unlike using a lower screen resolution) to retain smooth motion. The advantage here is that it's not stuck to a predefined resolution list, and the UI elements (which are often very cheap to draw) can stay at full resolution. The game can also cap the resolution scale, or set a static scale via game options for user choice.

This also works the other way around, too. Rather than lowering the internal resolution below the screen size, you can increase it above the screen size to enable a form of super-sampling anti-aliasing (SSAA), which if you have the power to spare, is far superior to the more common MSAA or FXAA techniques.

Re: Does anyone Still use 5:4 / 4:3 aspect ratios nowadays?

by PlayerLin » Sat Jul 21, 2018 5:35 am

phantombeta wrote: Except "real" fullscreen (exclusive mode fullscreen) has been deprecated in all OSes since ever, and none of them really officially support it, even Windows 7.
"Real" fullscreen has so many problems that it's pretty much garbage.
Well, at least it's still working in Windows 7...but I guess I just expected too much.

Garbage or not, it doesn't changed my mind.

EDIT at near half-hour later:
Come to think about it, maybe most games are actually using windowed fullscreen does proper handling and maintains in-game resolutions and changed back to desktop one when ALT+TAB out, so they never use that "problematic exclusive-mode fullscreen". But I don't know, I don't like those programs which cannot proper changes resolutions when startup/alt+tab out/something made out of focus without proper reasons(proper reasons like OpenGL softwares, I know it's limitation so they have to stuck on in-game resolution when alt+tab out)...but I guess even I don't like them, I have to accept them since no way to really get around that...

Re: Does anyone Still use 5:4 / 4:3 aspect ratios nowadays?

by phantombeta » Sat Jul 21, 2018 5:31 am

PlayerLin wrote:Yes, I prefer real fullscreen, screw M$ and their silly reasons for not properly supporting real fullscreen in Windows 10. While this is sad for me but I guess I have to stay at Win7 (like forever?) if they never changed their mind...lack of classic UI just other major reason but I can try fix it myself, but real fullscreen is unfix-able to me too. :3:
Except "real" fullscreen (exclusive mode fullscreen) has been deprecated in all OSes since ever, and none of them really officially support it, even Windows 7.
"Real" fullscreen has so many problems that it's pretty much garbage.

Re: Does anyone Still use 5:4 / 4:3 aspect ratios nowadays?

by PlayerLin » Sat Jul 21, 2018 5:25 am

I still using 800x600 for desktop mostly(My monitor is BenQ GL2250, 16:9, don't know if it even be sold on outside of where I live), but recently since I needed play some mobile games with BlueStacks(only windowed fullscreen, great!), had to be forced using higher resolution like 1600x900 or the games will looks like unreadable shit......recently I decided to run GZDooM with 1920x1080 for some silly reasons(no, I don't want to tell why!:P), so although my eye hurts by small font(I explained on other thread for my own unfix-able reason(s) for refused to adjust system DPIs to actually using 1080p on desktop.), I'm still try and getting used the 1600x900/1920x1080, at least for playing games.
Spoiler: Silly rant inside, read on your own risk.

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