Jacob Fox, Hardware Writer
This week: I was reading The Singularity is Closer to Ray Kurzweil and trying to understand how anyone could think AI has phenomenal consciousness. Watch this space for some juicy takes.
16:10 resolution is coming back into fashion with laptops, that much is known. Everyone loves 16:10 laptops.
Even here at PC Gamer, people just can’t stop talking about them. Over a year ago, Katie Wickens talked about how 16:10 gaming laptops were finally showing that we were evolving, and the love for these slightly stretched displays has only spread since then.
Our page showcasing our picks for the best gaming laptops is emblazoned with the words “16:10 this, 16:10 that.” Back in April 2023, our hardware commander Dave thought that gaming monitors were getting their aspect ratios wrong—you know, because they weren’t 16:10.
And listen, I get it (really!). My first monitor, which I bought almost two decades ago, was 16:10 (1680 x 1050 TFT panel). They are roomy and great to operate not only for gaming but for everything else. Which is especially essential for laptops, because they usually have problems with the diagonal.
But there’s something no one wants to talk about that makes 16:10 games less than ideal: some games (and certainly all of the ones I tested) are designed to run in 16:9 initially.
This means that when you switch to 16:10, you don’t get an extra view of the game scene on top. Instead, you get a magnified slice of the full 16:9 format, which means you lose a few pixels and are at a slight disadvantage (for those who care).
I know this seems counterintuitive. I didn’t believe it at first when I tested the HP Omen Transcend 14 for review purposes another websitebut eventually I accepted that my eyes were not deceiving me. And upon closer inspection, I discovered that this is how many games are made: adding additional vertical space is not something that actually exists, at least in the games I’ve seen.
Yes, of course you get extra pixels on top, but what I mean is that those pixels don’t correspond to the up-to-date visuals in the game. You get an enlarged image and lose in other words, at a certain FOV in the game. Here’s a comparison to show you what I mean:
The image on the left is 16:9, and the image on the right is 16:10. If you look at the left and right sides of the screen, you can see that more of the game is displayed in 16:9 resolution.
Which brings me to the next part of the problem, and why I say this is a problem for gaming on laptops.
When I realized it was a Transcend 14 issue, my first thought was: Okay, I don’t want a stretched aspect ratio, and 16:10 cuts off some of the game space, so I guess I should play 16:9 with black borders. That should be the end of it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t that elementary.
The Transcend 14 has hybrid graphics that let you switch between integrated and dedicated graphics depending on what you’re doing. In theory, this is great because it allows for low power consumption when you’re not gaming, but full performance when you are.
But that makes changing things like aspect ratio resolution awfully arduous. Unless you have a MUX switch (unlikely), it all happens in the background. And what that meant for me was that I couldn’t access the Display tab in the Nvidia Control Panel because the Nvidia GPU didn’t see itself as connected to the entire OS.
Ultimately, this meant I couldn’t change how GPU scaling worked. This meant I was stuck with stretched visuals (like skinny game characters that are difficult to hit) if I wanted the extra pixels that 16:9 offers. The Intel Graphics Command Center didn’t solve my problem either.
The only way to get black borders was to change the resolution outside of the game and then run each game in a borderless window, which was a pain and introduced more input lag anyway (I know, I checked). In fact, for some reason, doing this completely froze my system in one game (Counter-Strike 2).
Now, it’s difficult to pin the blame on one place. Part of it is the way hybrid graphics systems work these days, sure. But it wouldn’t have to be that way if laptops stuck to 16:9. And ultimately, it wouldn’t be a problem if games didn’t run like some of them, and the extra space could simply be put on taller screens.
But that’s not how it works, and no one seems to want to hear that. Fingers in ears, everyone joyful, pretending that gaming on a 16:10 laptop is perfect. Well, sorry to spoil the party, but I think I’ll stick with 16:9 for now.
