Regular vs. Widescreen

Owners of widescreen monitors were until recently often forgotten about. Most games, including Xbox360 ports simply didn’t include widescreen resolutions. Usually a small tweak to one of the game configuration files was all it took to enable support, but even then the result wasn’t ideal.

Bioshock skips the first part of the problem, with widescreen resolutions available straight out of the box. Much to our disappointment however the widescreen technique used in Bioshock results in FOV (Field of View) loss. Instead of expanding the FOV to the left and right the authors simply decided to cut away a portion of the FOV from the top and bottom. The end result is about 10% of the vertical FOV lost.

If you take a good look you’ll notice that the lower end of the gun handle is simply cut off from the widescreen shot. While this is hardly a bit deal some gamers just prefer to play with a true widescreen FOV. There is a game hack available online that enables true widescreen, however as of writing this there is no official way to get true widescreen support in the game.

The loss of the FOV isn’t all bad however. With fewer polygons to draw, the framerates often increase slightly, which can come in handy at times.

The two resolutions used don’t have the same amount of pixels – the difference is about 8% in favour of 1600x1200. As such it is only natural the performance will be a bit better at 1680x1050, though any gains beyond the 8% must be attributed to the FOV loss.

As expected all 5 cards received considerable fps boosts, mainly to the minimum and maximum fps figures. As a result the 8600GT and HD2600XT managed to break the 20fps barrier. The 8600GTS also displayed similar increases, and even the HD2900XT and 8800GTX received a solid fps increase.