My 24" monitor has a native resolution of 1920x1200. Let's say for some reason I want to set it to 1920x1080. But if I use the default Windows 7's Screen Resolution window to set the resolution to 1920x1080 then the picture gets stretched, i.e. it still takes the full screen while I want to have cropped dark lanes on the top and bottom.
How can I change the resolution without stretching the picture?
02 Answers
Regardless of it being AMD or NVIDIA, you need to change how the card scales.
For AMD see here (Although I have not personally used it as I don't own an AMD card) How-To Enable and Configure GPU Scaling Feature
For NVIDIA
Right click on desktop and select the "NVIDIA Control Panel"
Go to "Adjust desktop size and position" under "Display"
Given that you are looking to change without stretching, you would choose "No Scaling" which will give you black bars top and bottom in this case (1920 x 1080 on a 1920 x 1200 screen).
Depending on what you are looking to achieve, you could play with both both "Aspect Ratio" and "No Scaling", to see what works best for you. Aspect ratio will stretch to the max width or height without distorting the image, but will blur/soften the picture.(often used in CS GO)
I use "GPU" to perform scaling. As pointed out by Hennes, you can change this to "Monitor" but you may also need to adjust your monitor settings depending on the model.
You will then need to change your resolution to one of the available options or create a custom option. This is done in "Change Resolution" under "Display" or through your windows display settings.
There are two places where you can change this:
- In the drivers themselves (e.g. as show my Marks good answer above)
- On the monitor itself. All recent screens I have used have an option to either:
- Display the image input starting from the top left.
- Display the image centered.
- Or scale the image so it will fill the while screen.
In this case you want to turn that off in both places.
