Ultra wide gaming and GW2

[LaFurion.3167]

Hello all. I know very few people here will be gaming on an ultra wide monitor. I would like to post my insights AS WELL AS ask for some technical help in relation to such wide monitors and gw2.

I bought a 49" ultrawide curved gaming monitor. 120htz, super high def, basically the best on the market (or what I could find in new zealand), cost about $2000nzd.

Now I will start off my saying this; apex legends runs like an absolute beast. The wide field of view literally makes you feel like you have eyes on the side of your head. There are no quality drops except for numbers when you hit someone that are stretched horizontally.

For guild wars 2 however, the experience was slightly less amazing. While the game on such an ultra wide monitor still looks amazing, the sides of the monitor are noticeably stretched.. not a lot, but still not normal. It's definitely still beautiful though. In this regard, having the un broken landscape of a monitor far outweighs the triple monitor setups that I have seen, by a long shot.

Coming from a 32" monitor I could tell however, how "short" the monitor felt. This is probably just years of being on that monitor; would probably get used it it after a few days. It is a pity however that such wide monitors are so short. I hear that in a year or two, they will start to be made higher (effectively stitching 2 32" monitors together instead of the 27" ones). But the quality of the ulteawide, alongside the total immersion experience again outweighs the short feeling.

Character selection was where it was a huge problem. The character selection screen would only display the torso portion of my char characters, cutting off at the jaw on the top, and knees/feet at the bottom. It happened with all races except asura. All other Ui in the character select was as normal. I did some research and apparently there is no fix for this unless anet does some fixes for ultra wide in selection screen. Load screens only used the middle part of the monitor too, effectively displaying what a 27" one would display (quality was fine though).

Side note - My biggest problem with the monitor was how bad quality video players were on it. HD videos would play on low quality, very fuzzy and obviously 480p even when I made 100000% sure that it was set to 4k, 1080, or even 720. And some websites such as Netflix, and also select videos from YouTube were clipped off, requiring scrolling up and down to "see" the screen.

I wonder if any one has input/experiences with these kinds of monitors? For guild wars, character selection screen aside, I was a little disappointed in the stretching that occurred at the sides, even if it was minimal.

I am aware that this is basically relevant to maybe like 50 people out there in the world, but am still curious and grateful to hear your thoughts/experiences. I hope I don't come off as bragging either. I'm 27 and have played on PC since I was 12. Not a single time have I played on anything above 60htz, even for fps games! So this year I have decided to just go hard at work, save up a lot of money and basically buy the best that money can buy. I have been playing on like 20fps in wvw for too long... less sometimes. It's about time to upgrade from 60htz, and gw2 is such a beautiful game.

Also if there are any anet devs reading this, could you please fix the loading screen for ultra wide monitor users :).

Thanks all!

[Grey Poupon.8407]

I play with a 35 inch ultra wide curved monitor and only maybe a little bit of the head of my tallest charr character gets cropped off the top in the selection screen. Are you sure you have the game set to an ultra wide resolution? Mine is 3440 x 1440.. Also, for things like streaming on netflix, hulu or amazon prime if you use chrome there are some extensions you can add on to help with that just try searching for them on google or something.

[LaFurion.3167]

@"Grey Poupon.8407" said:I play with a 35 inch ultra wide curved monitor and only maybe a little bit of the head of my tallest charr character gets cropped off the top in the selection screen. Are you sure you have the game set to an ultra wide resolution? Mine is 3440 x 1440.. Also, for things like streaming on netflix, hulu or amazon prime if you use chrome there are some extensions you can add on to help with that just try searching for them on google or something.

I am absolutely positive that the game is set to ultra wide. In game is fine, it's just the character selection screen suffers. Evidently, the wider the screen, the more the character selection gets cut. Yours is 35" and suffers from a little clipping, mine is 49" and suffers from a loooot.

Although my gf seems to be ok with this so she might take the 49" and play with it. Its still an amazing screen.

Any ideas/thoughts on the sides stretching? Again all settings I'm sure I've configured correctly.

[Tinker.6924]

I don't have a 49" beast, but in generalMake sure the in game Display settings for size and resolution match what Windows has. It shouldn't be lower. Unlike older monitors, the current monitors perform better at higher resolutions.

And post for help in the tech support forumhttps://en-forum.guildwars2.com/categories/account-technical-supportYou will get more visibility with arenanet employees.

[TheBravery.9615]

play the game in windowed mode, resize the game window to fit whatever you want to eliminate the 'stretch' effect on the corner of the screen.

In general I like playing on ultrawide I'm grateful this game supports it. The level of situational awareness it brings when playing pvp/wvw is outstanding.

[Grey Poupon.8407]

Try re-setting the camera options and things like field of view back to their original settings in the game and then adjust them to your liking after that. I still had mine set for playing with my old monitor before I switched. That helped a little too.

Unfortunately for movies and other internet video, unless it is filmed in ultra wide you will always have some black bars on the sides even for 4k and 1080p. on the other hand though, things that are filmed in ultra wide look amazing.

[Harapuia.5761]

I have this same monitor, but coming from a triple screen setup i may have some further insights to share. Over the past decade I've had a lot of experience with crazy wide displays and it's pitfalls.

The so called stretching you refer to is a result of perspective rendering. It's a normal side-effect from having such a ridiculous FOV as we do. As GW2 has a fairly high native FOV it sticks out more than it would on a game with lower FOV such as Apex legends. A handful of games compensate for this behavior by adding extra software-cameras per screen, but it's not a proper solution for a single monitor. Either case, this is perfectly normal behavior and mathematically correct. If you look for it you'll find it's even present on 16:9 displays. You'll get used to it!

The loading screen clipping, like the character selector, videos, map screen and certain HUD elements, are all a result of this game's UI engine being VERT-. This refers to how the game responds when the display grows wider. In this case the game compensates by reducing vertical space. Ideally what we'd be looking for is Hor+ behavior, which widens the visible space as the monitor gets wider. You'll find more games that have this behavior, as it's especially common with Unreal Engine titles. Often patches exist that allow this to be rectified.

For GW2 this issue is especially bothersome to me, because they already have a proper implementation for Triple screen setups which fixes all this. I've written a post about it here: https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/79565/feature-request-improve-32-9-support-by-exposing-triple-screen-support#latest. I have some ideas on how to fix it myself, but I'd much prefer an official solution.

I can't replicate your experience with video playback. Youtube has yet to clip for me even once, and 4k video is sharp for me. However often this is a result of some "fill to screen" zooming setting, which may be worth looking for. Maybe you have an example for me to try? What MAY also help is that i use DisplayFusion to make a single 2160*1440p segment in the center of my monitor. This way my browser conforms to the 16:9 expectancy, while i have two (elongated) 720p screens on each side of it.

I do recommend you put the monitor to 100hz in desktop mode. At 10 bits color, 120hz and 5120x1440 it outright does not have enough bandwidth. It compensates for this by using chroma subsampling. Using this technique it groups pixels together and displays their average, thus affecting your image clarity.

Let me know if i can help you any further!

[Icengard.6145]

Hello, I'm also using the ultrawide 49" monitor!Although the game play didn't bother me but it really bothers me when I'm on "choosing character screen" and when I'm on dialogue screen because the screen cuts my character from chest and above.Has anyone figured a way to fix this issue?

[fiftypercentgrey.7108]

Same issue here but can't find a fix either...

[Heron.6859]

I've been running a 49" ultrawide as well.

My guess is that the character selection and loading screens are fixed to a non ultrawide aspect ratio.

Dev probably need to add art for ultrawide for the loading screen and character selection part.

 

[Megaman.5463]

Same problem here. Please fix this. 

[TheQuickFox.3826]

I'm playing on 3440x1440 ultrawide and it has been a great experience. It helps getting immersed into the game. GW2 has good support for ultrawide because it has a FoV slider so you can adjust FoV to whatever you like. I'm usually ar around 85% of the slider to the max. (Not 85 degrees)

 

The only thing that does not always work well is cutscenes and video's. These can have some scaling issues. But overall I'm very happy playing GW2 on ultrawide.