Stretching application screen to suit monitor resolution

Sablicious

I'd like to know how to to stretch the screen of games, particluarly, to fill the screen of my 1920x1080 monitor.

I've thought this was not possible and all you could do was get a 'window boxed' display when setting an application's resolution below your monitors -or- run the image to an external monitor / TV (which I often do and allows for full screen display).

But after installing a game called Just Cause 2, I found that even if I set the in-game resolution to 1280x720, it still fills the my monitor's 1920x1080 screen (...albeit with a slight downgrade in resolution, obviously).

However, this is the only game I've found that seems to do this. All others merely adjust my monitor resolution according to what the application's is set to, resulting in a smaller, window boxed viewing area.

So how does one go about forcing an application to fill the monitor irrespective of resolution settings?

Specs:
i7 Q820 (8GB)
ATI HD Radeon 4670 (1GB)
Win 7 Ultimate

(thanks)

automaticman · 05-04-2012, 05:08 | posts: 663 | Location: Orange County, CA

Most games have options for both resolution and window type. Normally you want to set the window type to fullscreen, then if you change the resolution, your monitor should adjust itself to that resolution and play the game in the entire screen. This is the same as if you went into the windows resolution screen and adjusted the desktop resolution.

In windowed mode, setting a game to a resolution lower than your desktop resolution means the game will not fill up the whole screen (but the monitor will remain at it's native resolution, which is best for image quality).

Some games have an option called windowed borderless which lets you run a game at your monitor's native resolution in a window but look like it is in fullscreen mode. This can make it easy to alt-tab out of the game since all you are really doing is changing windows. It's particularly useful if you have a second monitor that is not used for gaming.

so, what you are looking for is an option to keep the game in fullscreen mode, and then change to a lower resolution.

Sablicious · 05-04-2012, 07:59 | posts: 2

Okay. I've worked it out.

It seems I needed to change the "full screen" setting for "Attributes" in the ATI Catalyst Control Centre for both 1280x720 and 1280x1024, for some odd reason.

As I was trying to run games in 1280x720 (16:9), I thought changing said parameter alone would be enough. Guess not...

Tested a bunch of games and it seems to work fine now. Thanks