How you figure? If you had a display that had a portion taken out of the center at the top and bottom, but was still 1080 pixels high at the ends, you wouldn't be able to call it a 1080p display. Kinda like if you have to set a custom resolution to get 2-3 displays that are not alike to act as one. If you have two that are 1920x1080 along the sides, and one that's 1920x1200 in the middle, the resolution you'd be able to have is 5760x1080.... not 5760x1200. trying to recreate the benefit to FoV on a curved display by creating a faux curve on a flat screen only ends up lowering visible detail, no matter how much it might help reduce distortion.
If you are talking about it from a technical/technological GPU way then i can tell you for sure that they are. You can't have a trapezoid. GPUs aren't built like that. They need a predictable 2D array of pixels in rows and columns to be able to take their shortcuts and make stuff appear on screen without breaking things. This goes especially if you want to use a texture format that is supported in the hardware from the GPU like DXT or PVR. They need to be in the power of two. If you put a texture of arbitrary resolution then it will be converted to the nearest (bigger or smaller) power of two resolution. If you want it to be NPOT (non power of two) then it won't be compressed to a GPU format. You want speed? Then things need to be in a rectangle or square. (like 512*256 or 512*512 or similar). You can't have a resolution window that is defined with curves. Not yet anyway i think. Even if you have a look at the latest ATi thing, it still is a rectangle, it just clips the image out of the screen.
You can't simply just cut away stuff from the screen. The view has to use a projection that produces a correctly distorted frame buffer. Regular perspective projection uses a plane that clips the view frustum, that plane is the surface on which the 3d world is projected. Then that projection is rasterized and shaded. Now, to produce a correctly distorted raster for curved screen usage, you'd need to program the game to use some other kind of projection. Instead of a clipping plane you'd need a clipping half-cylinder or something.
Well, I suppose its far too late now, but you can request an evaluation copy of Warpalizer... simple program using DX9-11 dlls for games... but sigh...
I also need to point out that squeezing the display like that does not change the FOV. Physically curved screens gain a real life FOV advantage, something you simply cannot simulate, and it's certainly not going to change the FOV of the view ingame. quick search Note how more of the scene is visible with a higher FOV, warping the display is not going to do that.
I was thinking: Increase FOV + Normal Res = Distortion Increase FOV + Warped Res = Less Distortion But meh... :|
Yes, yes I know. The dream is dead. ._. Someone needs to close this thread and purge it from history. They must never know the truths we uncovered here.
Well, if you actually discovered something that wasn't already known.... If you're cool with a distorted image, who is to dissuade you?
