NVIDIA's license agreement for the custom resolution tool is rather scary; it claims that it can destroy your graphics card and whatnot.
Click the Test button to see if your custom resolution works. The screen(s) will go black for a moment. The screen(s) will go black for a moment. With the right number combination, you should see.
In reality, how dangerous is it? Could I reasonably expect to be able to successfully try it on my Geforce GT 330m?
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2 Answers
Generally what that EULa is warning you about is that you can potentially enter settings that are downright silly (and cannot/willnot ever do anything useful) but your monitor may still try to actually show an image in the first place.
These modes are potentially dangerous in that they can be over-driving your monitor inputs or graphics card outputs as they can force the RAMDAC to operate very close to their maximum rate for long periods (i.e. high resolution with super high refresh rate) which could cause the component to overheat. The same goes for whatever is on the receiving end of this signal, if the monitor is 'dumb' and simply tries to show the image rather than doing a sanity check and simply dropping the signal on the floor like a sensible monitor would (along with displaying a 'Signal out of range' OSD image) it is possible that the signal voltages or extreme fast voltage swings may cause similar component overheating and damage.
As Moab states the software will perform a check to make sure that the graphics card can put out the signal, but as far as that EULA states you have the possibility (however unlikely) that you can cause damage and they are having no part of it. As far as they are concerned there are some basic standard resolutions and frequencies that they have to support, and most monitors are friendly enough to let the graphics card know what it is expecting.
Past that as far as they are concerned while the chances are that you know enough not to send 'bad' signals to your monitors this is their 'here be dragons, you're on your own from now on' page.
-=EDIT: Comment Cleanup =-
One thing that would be useful to do would be to Google the make/model of your monitor and find out its 'Horizontal refresh rate' as typically this is orders of magnitude higher than the vertical refresh rate (I think 50kHz is not uncommon) and make certain that whatever resolutions/refresh rates you end up with fit in your monitors horizontal and vertical refresh rates. Other than that the actual resolution should not matter too much, you just need to make sure that you are within the specifications of your monitor.
As an example my monitor shows that it can accept a vertical refresh rate of 55 to 75Hz and a horizontal rate of 24 to 80kHz, though I'm not sure how this applies to digital HDMI signals and I expect this is where the Bandwidth figure comes into it at 148MHz, the signal data rate on the Nvidia custom resolution page should not exceed this 'pixel data rate' or damage could potentially occur. Basically make sure that none of the timing signals the card is going to output is outside of what your monitor expects.
Also, in the Custom Resolution page int he Nvidia control panel if I leave the 'timing' set at 'Automatic' then it seems to give settings that match my monitors settings with a horizontal rate of 67.5kHz, vertical rate of 60Hz, and a pixel clock of 148.5MHz. These seem to correspond quite well to the>1616 gold badges140140 silver badges159159 bronze badges
It also says
The software will perform a check to make sure the end user defined resolution and refresh rate are supported by the graphics card.
Its a disclaimer of sorts since it is doing an end run around Windows settings.
Possible? anything is possible, that is why they added the disclaimer in the eula.
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TL;DR: scaling / resolution issues with the widescreen mod on non-native resolution? Scroll down to the solution below.
This topic is meant to address problems with resolution and positioning in the infinity engine after applying the Widescreen mod. Hopefully it is useful for people having the same issues I had.
Note: I use a Nvidia graphics card. I do not know whether Radeon cards and Intel chipsets give the same issues and, if so, whether the same type of solution may apply.
Note II: Although I only tested this on a BGII install, the solution should also work for other configurations, such as easyTutu or BGT
Bakground info & context
I installed BGII using GoJays2025's excellent guide. (Thanks for that!)
Everything worked well, including the Widescreen mod, when set to my display's native resolution of 1680x1050 (16:10 widescreen). However, problems occurred when I changed to different resolutions such as 1280x800 and 1440x900 (both also 16:10). The reason for changing was that the characters and world became too small for my tastes.
The issues
Depending on the resolution chosen, the issues were:
- Black bars on top and bottom (despite 16:10 resolution), causing the game's graphics to be compressed horizontally.
- Displacement of the UI: the top left corner of the UI was located at the centre of my display, causing 3/4th of the UI to be rendered off screen.
Analysis of the issue
As hinted at by the bigg (the mod's creator) in a topic on gibberlings3.net, the problem was as follows:
The chosen resolutions are not listed among those supported by the monitor. In other words, my graphics driver thought that my monitor could not support, e.g., 1440x900 and 1280x800.
The solution
- Open Nvidia control panel (should be possible to find it using Start, by pressing the Windows key once and then typing 'nvidia')
- In the tree on the left, click on 'Change resolution' to open the corresponding settings in the main part of the window (see attached image)
- The list of supported resolutions is displayed. Check whether the desired BGII resolution is listed.
- If it is already listed, you probably have another problem than I did :(. You may want to check out the optional step at the end of this post, though.
- If not, press the 'Customize...' button (see the red #1 in the attached image)
- Make sure that 'Enable resolutions not exposed by the display' is checked
- Via the 'Create Custom Resolution' button, add your desired resolution(s) (#2 in the attached image)
- Make sure that the added resolutions show up and are checked (#3 in the attached image), then press OK to close the window
- That's it! The widescreen mod should now successfuly use the resolutions you added.
- optional. All non-native resolutions (in my case anything else than 1668x1050) is scaled to fit the monitor. Normally, this scaling is performed by the monitor itself. Alternatively, you can have the graphics card (GPU) do the scaling, which might help if the above didn't solve your issue. In the tree on the left, go to 'Adjust desktop size and position', then change the scaling to GPU (see the second attached image). Also, you can change the scaling mode if desired (e.g. to use no scaling and just surround the image with black bars).
This topic is meant to address problems with resolution and positioning in the infinity engine after applying the Widescreen mod. Hopefully it is useful for people having the same issues I had.
Note: I use a Nvidia graphics card. I do not know whether Radeon cards and Intel chipsets give the same issues and, if so, whether the same type of solution may apply.
Note II: Although I only tested this on a BGII install, the solution should also work for other configurations, such as easyTutu or BGT
Bakground info & context
I installed BGII using GoJays2025's excellent guide. (Thanks for that!)
Everything worked well, including the Widescreen mod, when set to my display's native resolution of 1680x1050 (16:10 widescreen). However, problems occurred when I changed to different resolutions such as 1280x800 and 1440x900 (both also 16:10). The reason for changing was that the characters and world became too small for my tastes.
The issues
Depending on the resolution chosen, the issues were:
- Black bars on top and bottom (despite 16:10 resolution), causing the game's graphics to be compressed horizontally.
- Displacement of the UI: the top left corner of the UI was located at the centre of my display, causing 3/4th of the UI to be rendered off screen.
Analysis of the issue
As hinted at by the bigg (the mod's creator) in a topic on gibberlings3.net, the problem was as follows:
The chosen resolutions are not listed among those supported by the monitor. In other words, my graphics driver thought that my monitor could not support, e.g., 1440x900 and 1280x800.
The solution
- Open Nvidia control panel (should be possible to find it using Start, by pressing the Windows key once and then typing 'nvidia')
- In the tree on the left, click on 'Change resolution' to open the corresponding settings in the main part of the window (see attached image)
- The list of supported resolutions is displayed. Check whether the desired BGII resolution is listed.
- If it is already listed, you probably have another problem than I did :(. You may want to check out the optional step at the end of this post, though.
- If not, press the 'Customize...' button (see the red #1 in the attached image)
- Make sure that 'Enable resolutions not exposed by the display' is checked
- Via the 'Create Custom Resolution' button, add your desired resolution(s) (#2 in the attached image)
- Make sure that the added resolutions show up and are checked (#3 in the attached image), then press OK to close the window
- That's it! The widescreen mod should now successfuly use the resolutions you added.
- optional. All non-native resolutions (in my case anything else than 1668x1050) is scaled to fit the monitor. Normally, this scaling is performed by the monitor itself. Alternatively, you can have the graphics card (GPU) do the scaling, which might help if the above didn't solve your issue. In the tree on the left, go to 'Adjust desktop size and position', then change the scaling to GPU (see the second attached image). Also, you can change the scaling mode if desired (e.g. to use no scaling and just surround the image with black bars).
Attachments:
addcustomresolut.jpg (223 Kb)
havegpudoscaling.jpg (161 Kb)
Post edited August 04, 2014 by Chilling
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