Grpahics cards and flat screen monitors?

[Fred98]

At home I use a 19” CRT monitor (18” viewable) with an excellent graphics card designed for gaming.

At the office we have recently been provided with a 17” flat screen monitor. I was wondering whether it is worth getting one for home use.

At home I play 2D top-down war games such as Uncommon Valour and Close Combat. Both have excellent graphics.

I came into work very early and installed UV on the PC just to check the graphics quality of the flat screen.

I found that the quality is good. Unfortunately it is so good, that it picks up all the graphic faults – thereby ruining the game.

I checked the graphics card in case we use a low end card for business. It is a Matrox Millennium G450. The web site says that the card is good for DVDs and for games. But I cannot decipher the technical details.

And when I change the screen resolution it has no effect on the graphics quality of UV.

Are the poor graphics due to the graphics card or is the monitor so good it picks up the graphical faults?

[Fred98]

This is the answer I received from the experts over on the PC forum. A very unexpected answer:


“Matrox make probably the best 2D cards on the market in the normal price range. They're not top of the range for gamers, but are popular with CAD users, photographers etc.

So I'd say it's possible the card is too good for your games.”

[XPav]

That sounds like crap. Seriously. Crap crap.

What's most likely happening is that UV is forcing the screen to 1024x768, while the native res of the LCD is probably higher.

As a result, the screen looks like crap because its scaling the 1024x768 to a strange pixel resolution.

I also have no idea what you mean by "Graphics Faults". Explain.

Are you seeing tearing and bitmap screwiness in UV? Do bitmaps show up in the wrong place and the like?

Various drivers for video cards (like the Nvidia 40.something new that I'm using) exhibit these problems, but these are driver bugs.

[Fred98]

By graphic faults I mean the text – the names of bases is out of focus. It is as though I have zoomed in and can see that the letters such as the “S” are made up of pixels with jagged edges rather than a lovely curve.

The base screens now cover most of the screen. Adjusting the screen resolution makes no difference.

Every detail again looks like it is made up of pixels with jagged edges. Every graphic is out of focus and or had jagged edges.

On my home PC the graphics of UV are fantastic but on this PC are hopeless.

[XPav]

Out of focus.

Yup, that's the scaling of the LCD.

Unlike a CRT, an LCD can't switch resolutions. It has a fixed resolution, which in your case, is NOT 1024x768. (Check the display control panel to see what the native res of the LCD is). So, to make a 1024x768 screen fit, it has to do the horrible jaggy scaling thing.

Now, this does bring a up a good point, namely that Uncommon Valor has hardcoded screen sizes, making it ugly and horrible for anyone with a recent model laptop (which pretty much all have >1024x768 res) or LCD screens.

Dear Matrix and 2by3: Please take out the fixed size graphics in UV. Else, in years to come when we all have flat screens, we won't play UV because it'll look like crap, as Joe98 has found today.

[fcooke]

I've had graphics problems with UV with both my (fairly new) Dells. On my desktop 1.7Mhz 64MB Nvidia with nice big flatpanel display I suffer the 'explosions/gunfire graphics don't display' and when they suddenly do the sound goes into a loop and the PC is completely hosed. Then last Nov I bought a nice top end laptop. UV graphics tend to write over themselves on this machine, plus I get the Commodore 64 brightly colored screen if I alt tab between apps. As an added benefit my two email partners have no problems with files generated from the desktop machine but can't use files generated form the laptop. I'm beginning to think it's because of the hardcoded screen size. I'm also beginning to wonder if other victims of the appearing graphics/sound loop system crash were using flat panels as well. A long shot, but if so.....

[Mr.Frag]

Almost all new flat panels are 1280 x 1024 fixed resolution or higher.

They just use graphics expansion to boost the 1024 x 768 to fit the screen. The aspect ratio between these two modes are not the greatest.

You might want to see if you have the option of disabling this expansion mode to get things down to the proper scaling factor.

You might want to also try various modes of Anti-Aliasing if your video card supports it to try and smooth out the jaggies.

This has been a very common problem over the years, first showing up a long time back with applications coded at 640 x 480 not scaling well on 800 x 600 panels. This is the price you pay for spending money on a non-CRT based display that only has 1 refresh rate and size available. While panels are great from a size standpoint, they still do not hold a candle to a nice trinitron tube when it comes to anything other then office applications. I always wonder why people dish out the insane prices for a 17" panel when they could get a 21"+ CRT for less bucks ...

[XPav]

Originally posted by fcooke
I've had graphics problems with UV with both my (fairly new) Dells. On my desktop 1.7Mhz 64MB Nvidia with nice big flatpanel display I suffer the 'explosions/gunfire graphics don't display' and when they suddenly do the sound goes into a loop and the PC is completely hosed. Then last Nov I bought a nice top end laptop. UV graphics tend to write over themselves on this machine, plus I get the Commodore 64 brightly colored screen if I alt tab between apps. As an added benefit my two email partners have no problems with files generated from the desktop machine but can't use files generated form the laptop. I'm beginning to think it's because of the hardcoded screen size. I'm also beginning to wonder if other victims of the appearing graphics/sound loop system crash were using flat panels as well. A long shot, but if so.....

Graphics drivers. Always. Get new graphics drivers for your video card to see if the fix the problem. If that doesn't work, try older drivers.

Your "not being able to use files from the laptop" is most likely a completely unrelated problem.

[fcooke]

Why flat panel over CRT? Space. I was all set to get the 21" CRT. Better half vetoed it. And the laptop doesn't really come with the CRT option (OK - I guess I could hook it up to one but then it becomes somewhat non-mobile).....

[David Heath]

I have duel flat screen monitors on my desk and I get the same problem. I ask the Keith and company to look into this and we will see what if anything can be done.

[XPav]

Put a command line option in for higher screen resolutions.

[Joel Billings]

Until we find a way to fix this, you can play by setting the screen to 16 bit color mode and then using a -w command line option. This appears to work. We are working on this for the patch so players won't have to physically change the color mode.