Vesa And Widescreen

[Lprogster]

...

Thanks,
Lster

[AndrewAPrice]

Been thinking about VESA and widescreen. Vesa doesn't appear to support widescreen resolutions like 1280x800, but couldn't I simply use a 1280x1024 resolution and ignore the bottom 224 pixels?

What happens if you use a resolution different to your monitor (I mean both lower and higher). One thing I notices about (older versions of) Ubuntu was that it stretched a 1024x768 resolution over my 1280x800 screen...

I think it was using Vesa - now I use the FGLRX driver...

Thanks,
Lster

My LCD TV let me use 1280x1024, even though the vertical resolution was above what it natively supports. I think most LCD screens would have some sort of down-scaling support in their inbuilt processors (others may just only show a small section of the screen). The quality of your final image will vary.

CRTs are a lot different. Since they're analogue devices, you're going to get out of sync lines and messed up colours, with the image having a fast flickering/scrolling effect. Most CRT though have digital circuits which check the image before it tries to display it, and will give an "INVALID VIDEO MODE", "OUT OF RANGE", or similar error message if it's not supported.

For lower resolutions, nearly all displays stretch out the image. On a lot of laptops, you can disable a BIOS hardware setting to not stretch out the screen, leaving you with a black border. In the NVidia drivers for Windows (I'm not sure about the Linux drivers) there's an option to disable the stretching as well (which is basically a 'software' way of doing it - the driver draws the screen in the middle (with your display set to its highest resolution) with a border).