Jacob Fox, hardware writer
This week: I’ve been reading Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Nearer and trying to understand how anyone can think AI has phenomenal consciousness. Watch this space for some spicy takes.
16:10 resolution is making a massive comeback thanks to laptops, this much is known. Everyone loves 16:10 laptops.
Even here at PC Gamer, people just can’t keep themselves from banging on about them. Over a year ago Katie Wickens was speaking about how 16:10 gaming laptops show we’re finally evolving, and the love for these slightly stretched displays has only spread since.
Our page outlining our picks for the best gaming laptops is adorned with “16:10 this, 16:10 that”. As far back as April 2023, our hardware commander Dave even reckon that gaming monitors are doing aspect ratios wrong—you know, because they’re not 16:10.
And listen, I get it (honest!). My very first monitor that I purchased almost two decades go was 16:10 (a 1680 x 1050 TFT panel). They’re spacious and they feel great to use not just for gaming but for everything else besides. Which is especially important for laptops given they are, more often than not, diagonally challenged.
But there’s something nobody seems to want to discuss that makes 16:10 gaming less than ideal, and this is that at least some games (certainly all the ones I tested) are initially designed to run in 16:9.
This means you don’t get any extra vision of the game scene on top when you switch to 16:10. Instead, you get a zoomed-in crop of the full 16:9 remit which means you’re losing out on some pixels and are at a slight competitive disadvantage (for those who care about such things).
This seems unintuitive, I know. I didn’t believe it at first when I tried out the HP Omen Transcend 14 for a review on a different website, but eventually I accepted that my eyes weren’t deceiving me. And after looking into it some more I discovered that that’s just the way many games are made: Adding extra vertical real estate isn’t really a thing, at least in the games I looked at.
Yes, of course you get extra pixels up top, but my point is these pixels don’t correspond to new in-game visuals. You’re getting a zoomed-in picture and losing out on some in-game FoV, in other words. Here’s a side-by-side showing what I mean:
The left-side image is 16:9, the right-side 16:10. If you look to the left and right of the screen you can see more in-game real estate is displayed at 16:9 resolution.
Which brings me to the next part of the problem, and this is why I say it’s a problem for laptop gaming.
When I realised this was a problem with the Transcend 14 my first thought was: Okay, I don’t want a stretched aspect ratio, and 16:10 is cutting off some game real-estate, so I guess I should play 16:9 with black borders. This should have been the end of it. Unfortunately, however, it wasn’t that simple.
The Transcend 14, has hybrid graphics that lets you switch between integrated and dedicated graphics depending on what you’re doing. This is great in theory because it allows for low power consumption when you’re not gaming but full performance when you are.
But it makes changing things like aspect resolution atrociously difficult. Unless you have a MUX switch (unlikely), this is all done in the background. And what this crucially meant for me is 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 operating system at large.
Ultimately, this meant I couldn’t change the way GPU scaling worked. Which meant I was stuck with stretched visuals (eg, skinny in-game characters that are hard to hit) if I wanted the extra pixels that 16:9 offers. Intel Graphics Command Center didn’t resolve the problem for me, either.
The only way to get black borders was to change my resolution outside the game and then run each game in borderless windowed, which was a hassle and at any rate introduces more input lag (I know, I checked). In fact, for some reason, doing this even completely crashed my system in one game (Counter-Strike 2).
Now, it’s hard to lay blame in any one place for all this. It’s partially the fault of the way hybrid graphics systems currently work, sure. But this wouldn’t have to be the case if laptops were sticking to 16:9. And ultimately, it wouldn’t be an issue if games didn’t work the way some seem to and extra real estate could just be stacked on top on taller screens.
But that’s not the way it works, and nobody seems to want to hear it. Fingers in ears, everyone’s content pretending 16:10 laptop gaming is perfect. Well, sorry to be a party pooper, but I think I’ll stick to 16:9 for now.
