Widescreen gaming is very important to NVIDIA and we have been on the forefront of helping panels vendors get new displays that can run at 1440x900, 1680x1050, 1920x1200, and 2560x1600. Because of a lot of hard work by our developer relations team and by great widesceen gaming evangelists sites like the Widescreen Gaming Forum, most games now support “computer” HD widescreen resolution (listed above) and what I will call “consumer electronic” widescreen HD modes found on HDTVs, like 720p and 1080p.
I continue to see more and more NVIDIA users using HDTVs as primary displays. In fact, the number seems to be growing each year. Last year we ran a survey and found that 20% of users who spent $199 or more on their GPU use an HDTV as their primary display. Just recently, we ran two additional surveys and that number has grown to 35%.
Using an HDTV with your NVIDIA GPU is a great option. NVIDIA PureVideo technology allows you to watch Blu-Ray or HD DVD movies in 1080p and you can also play all of your games at 1080p in widescreen mode.
But some users have expressed concerns using HDTVs for widescreen gaming since most overscan the HDTV signal and can cut off portions of games, including the HUD. The overscan amount can change for each display and it is frustrating that some HDTVs do it more than others. NVIDIA does have a feature for that called “Resize HDTV desktop” and our forum champion ChrisRay has a nice write-up on how to use it. We will continue to work on modifying this feature and make it better for users.
So my question is, how important is it that your SLI PC be integrated into your entertainment center, alongside your PS3 and Xbox 360? Would you rather use a PC widescreen display or an HDTV in your living room?
Please free to comment on this thread, or stop by and visit the SLIZone Widescreen Gaming forum.
personally I used an HD TV on my desk as my gaming rig monitor (Westinghouse LVM-37W3) and it's soooo nice for gaming, even sitting close.. I think the dot pitch is borderline too large for regular windows use at this distance, but games look awesome, and the immersiveness factor is extremely impressive.. I think this is also where having an SLI rig comes in handy, because I can run just about everything at 1920x1080 with max detail, 16xAF and 4xAA..
Posted by: rev | February 29, 2008 at 10:10 PM
Just a basic 32" HD ready TV here in the UK is around £350 ($700). I have been using dual displays for... Well since my FX5600. I've been spoilt. I even talked my employer into buying a 2nd monitor for me. My point being, that for single screen gaming (which SLI is only capable of) HDTV's are great. But to twin the blighters would be expensive and my desk would need to be huge. Wall mounting is an option but wow that's £700 ($1400). Most of us only dream of owning 8800GTX's let alone two of them in SLI and HDTV. Let's start the 'Dear Santa letter now!' :)
Posted by: Dodga | February 13, 2008 at 12:12 PM
For me, its more along the lines of my PC being my entertainment center with my consoles/hdtv being connected to it. My main rig is coupled with a 24" lcd that has HDCP/dvi, vga, component & composite inputs.
Posted by: [TMC]Kuyaglen | February 01, 2008 at 11:03 PM