Tech

Ultrawide Monitors for Gaming

In our Gaming Monitor Guide, we went over the tech-specs you should be looking for in a gaming monitor, including resolution, refresh rate, and more. One of the key ideas elaborated on was that maybe an ultra-high resolution like 4K isn’t worth it, at least not for your averaged-sized gaming monitor.

What if instead of cramming more pixels into standard widescreen displays, we used them to expand displays outward for a wider field-of-view? That’s where ultrawide gaming monitors entered the discussion.

Gaming on an Ultrawide Monitor – What’s the support like?

If you’re considering an ultrawide gaming monitor, the burning question that’s likely on your mind is game support. From monitors to laptops, TVs, and projectors, the majority of displays out there follow a widescreen format. Consequently, games are designed first-and-foremost with these widescreen displays in mind; it’s not guaranteed they’ll support less conventional ultrawide resolutions and monitors.

And it’s not just whether or not a game supports an ultrawide monitor. What’s arguably more important is if a game accounts for and takes advantage of an ultrawide monitor’s extra screen real estate. So, let’s break down the three tiers of gaming support you should expect for ultrawide monitors: no support, partial support, and full support.

No Support

This largely applies to older games, ones that were released well before the introduction of ultrawide screens to the mainstream market. While some games had the foresight to support arbitrary resolutions, many are hard-coded to only display resolutions that were popular at the time of the game’s release. Annoyingly, this continues to be a problem for some of the less PC-savvy game developers to this day. Elden Ring, one of 2022’s biggest games, does not support ultrawide resolutions. At least not natively.

Taking it upon themselves, modders have added support for ultrawide resolutions to many unsupported games, including Elden Ring. As covered in our Must-haves for PC gaming and Can you game on integrated graphics blogs, PC Gaming Wiki is a great site for sourcing these mods easily.

Not only does PCGW maintain a comprehensive list of games that do and don’t support ultrawide resolutions games natively (great for when you’re about to buy a game), they also provide download links to ultrawide resolution mods if applicable. Honestly, every PC gamer should have PCGW bookmarked, especially ultrawide gamers.

So if you’re comfortable modding your games from time to time, then an ultrawide monitor becomes a way more viable option. Most of the time it’s just dragging and dropping a file to your game’s install folder, no fiddling with .ini files or mod managers. That being said, it’s not as if these games simply won’t boot on an ultrawide monitor. They’ll still run, albeit in a non-ultrawide resolution with empty black space on either side of game.

Partial Support

In cut-scenes, Forza Horizon 4 has fake letterboxing on top of real pillarboxing.

It might be minimal at best, but most games do feature some support for ultrawide monitors. While these games accept and display at a correct ultrawide resolution, it won’t take long to realise that ultrawide support clearly wasn’t a high priority for the game’s developers. Which is somewhat understandable, seeing as ultrawide resolutions such as 2560×1080 and 3440×1440 make up less than 3% of the Steam Hardware Survey combined.

The first tell-tale sign that a game wasn’t designed with ultrawide monitors in mind is a stretched and/or poorly laid-out graphical user interface. If the GUI isn’t updated to account for the wider aspect ratio, it can prove difficult to use on an ultrawide monitor.

A good example is sticking the mini-map in the corner of the display. This might be fine on a standard monitor as you can glance at it in your peripheral vision. On an ultrawide monitor, however, this corner will be well outside of your periphery, making you crane your neck every time you want to look at the mini-map. It’s far from ideal but manageable.

What’s more intrusive on the gaming experience is when a game’s story sequences are pillar boxed due to the ultrawide resolution. A lot of cut-scenes are stored as pre-rendered videos and played back as needed. It’s not feasible to render out and store every cut-scene for every aspect ratio. Game file sizes are bloated enough as is. So most cut-scenes default to a standard aspect ratio with pillar boxing on ultrawide monitors.

Whether it’s for an artistic or technical reason, it’s not so easy to adapt in-engine cut-scenes for an ultrawide resolution either. That’s where modders come to the rescue again, releasing fixes to remove ‘fake’ pillar boxing laid over in-engine content. You might not like what’s lurking behind them, however: t-posing models, unloaded assets, and other bugginess you weren’t supposed to see. Other times it can be perfectly normal, leaving you wondering why the game shipped with them.

Support for ultrawide monitors in competitive-focused games can be questionable too. Some esports games (mainly first-person shooters such as Valorant and Overwatch) don’t support a ‘true’ ultrawide resolution. Boot up one of these games on an ultrawide monitor and it might look alright at first glance. Hop into some gameplay, however, and you’ll be able to tell that something’s off.

For “competitive integrity and fairness” as it’s framed, the wider field-of-view an ultrawide monitor affords will be cropped to match that of a standard aspect ratio. This can leave these games playing worse on an ultrawide monitor as the vertical field-of-view will be cropped in the process too.

Full Support

When a game fully supports ultrawide monitors right out of the box, without external tweaks, it makes for an unbelievably good gaming experience. Despite some notable outliers, more and more games support ultrawide monitors. The jump from what we’d consider ‘partial’ to ‘full’ support isn’t that large either. It’s mostly a few small touches that go a long way to enhance the user’s experience, like a properly adjusted GUI and no pillar boxing in any of the game’s content.

A recent high-profile example would be Kojima Productions’ PC port of Death Stranding. In fact, ultrawide support was prominently featured in the port’s marketing. In the run up to launch, Kojima Productions shared several videos of the port’s superb ultrawide support. These videos do an exemplary job at showcasing just how transformative an ultrawide resolution can be, widening your field-of-view and cramming it full of the game’s expansive landscapes.

Another game you’ve got to try on an ultrawide monitor is Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption 2. Graphically, this game is already mind-blowing on a standard widescreen monitor, but an ultrawide monitor takes it to another level. An ultrawide monitor’s wider, more natural field-of-view conveys the scale of the world ahead of you better than any other display. The sprawling vistas of open-world games like Death Stranding and Red Dead Redemption are that much more believable and in turn immersive on an ultrawide monitor.

Super-ultrawide curved displays

As ultrawide monitors are, well, wider than your standard monitor, they’ve got to have a degree of curvature to them. Most people can take or leave a standard curved monitor, but it’s practically essential on an ultrawide monitor. If the largest super-ultrawides weren’t curved, they’d be far too unwieldly for a desk. Even a slight curve can help rein in an ultrawide’s footprint.

More importantly, the curve enhances the viewing experience. Without it, the edge of an ultrawide would escape out of your peripheral vision. Although we’re primarily focused at the centre of a display, you don’t want to miss an enemy that’s crawling in from off-screen. Nor do you want to crane you neck from one edge of an ultrawide to another.

What’s more, a curve places you right in the middle of the action. It’s immersive and ensures the centre and the edges of the display are equidistant to your viewing for better viewing angles. If an ultrawide was completely flat, the distance and angle you’d look at the edges would differ from the centre, resulting in colour distortion. 

Completely bezel-less experience

You might be thinking a multi-monitor set-up achieves the same effect as an ultrawide monitor. However, ultrawides have one key advantage – no bezels. An ultrawide uses one continuous panel, with no bit of plastic splitting the display in two. Even though most modern monitors boast slim ‘bezel-less’ designs, they’re entirely distracting in a multi-monitor set-up. On the other hand, some enormous super-ultrawides are the equivalent of two standard monitors side-by-side for a truly bezel-less experience. Purely for the immersion factor alone, we’d recommend an ultrawide over an multi-monitor set-up if you’re looking to game.

As an ultrawide uses just the one panel, you won’t have to worry about colour uniformity between multiple panels either. Even if you pick up two of the exact same model of monitor, they won’t look exactly like-for-like due to slight tolerances in manufacturing. No matter how much you attempt to match each monitor through calibration, you can’t beat the variation at the panel level. One monitor might use a panel with a slightly warmer colour temperature while the other’s cooler, for instance. Tinkering with it through the monitor’s OSD or a custom colour profile only takes you so far.

Desktop Experience

It’s worth mentioning that an ultrawide monitor enhances more than just the games themselves. You’re often multi-tasking on a gaming PC: grinding away at an MMO, alt-tabbing to browse the game’s wiki, and listening to a Twitch stream in the background.

So, instead of playing in a full-screen mode, you could use an ultrawide’s extra screen real estate as space for your other programs. If you’re a livestreamer, this is another big advantage of an ultrawide monitor. Have your stream’s chat on one side of an ultrawide, your streaming software on another, with your game in-between the two.

While your average YouTube video or Twitch stream isn’t broadcast in an ultrawide format, most movies are. Free from letterboxing, an ultrawide monitor arguably makes for one of the better at-home movie experiences. Most streaming services, like Netflix, can detect and adjust to an ultrawide without much fuss. Though you’ll need to use a support browser, browser extension or app.

Ultrawide Gaming Monitors at Ebuyer

Whether it’s all the complex dials and instruments of an aeroplane or the side-view mirrors of a race car, ultrawide gaming monitors are utterly fantastic for simulation-focused games. Check out our review of the ASUS ROG STRIX XG43VG, in which we test Microsoft Flight Simulator, Forza Horizon, and more on this 43” super-ultrawide monitor. It’s the most ludicrous display we’ve covered on the Ebuyer YouTube channel yet.

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