Gaming Resolutions

It's not a question of games being compatible at that resolution... The main question is what video card will you be using if you get that Samsung screen?

It depends on what you're playing, really. Most modern games support widescreen resolutions natively. With the older stuff you'll have to do some digging and maybe some .ini editing to make it work.

I agree however that your GPU will have to be powerful enough to game at that resolution. Otherwise the new monitor would be a waste.

If you have an Nvidia graphics card, it doesn't need to be that powerful, as you can add many different 16:9 resolutions to play games with (in the Nvidia control panel). I play at 1440x810 on my 1920x1080 monitor and things look crisp and play very smoothly without turning settings down etc.

1680 is fine on a smaller screen, but at say 24" you will see the pixels instead of the picture, so a higher resolution is needed. With the higher resolution comes the need for faster graphics cards and cpus to get much more processing done and (18%) more pixels on the screen while maintaining frame rates.

This resolution is the "same" as "1080i", so you will likely find it in all newer games.

There aren't a lot of monitor reviews done, so not much good info is available.

Hopefully some folks will start responding with monitor suggestions instead of just graphics card worries.

He wants a good monitor FIRST, then we can suggest a vid card to drive it.

I'd suggest one, but I have no *data*.

The best info I could find with a reasonable effort is this 5/2008 article:

http://www.anandtech.com/displays/ [...] =3302&p=12

Since that was 5/2008, the table and the article may tell you more what to look for than which model to choose.

To drive these well, you will want a 260-216 or 275 graphics card, or the ATI equivalents. Stay away from xfire/sli for an initial install if you can. A good list of best cards for the money and what gaming they will do is here:

http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 404-4.html

I do like the notion that "1080i" will be used in future games. I know its the choice for consoles nowadays, but I wasn't sure about PC.

Its a plus too that its actually 16:9 and will run movies fullscreen in HDMI.

That was one dissapointment with my current 16:10 ratio.. I bought all widescreen movies and low and behold I still had a border.

Hehe. I feel your pain. I have a terrific 27" Dell monitor running at 1920 . . . and its got noticable lag. probably the most important line in Anand's review was this:

"The table tells a clear story: all of the S-PVA panels as we mentioned clearly have more input lag/internal processing lag than all of the TN panels."

So, if you look at the table, get a Samsung with a TN screen if you want a true gaming monitor.