I found a pretty good deal of a high-end gaming laptop (has a NVidia RTX 3080 chipset, 8-core Ryzen 9 5900HX CPU, 1TB SSD, 32GB RAM, in performance tests it rates among the very best in performance, it has quite favorable reviews online overall etc.), which I am very close to taking now as I got a big tax return and have quite a bit of "loose money"; plus, my old and trusty ASUS gaming laptop (about 10 years or age now) finally broke down beyond repair, I think. It is very pricey, but it has quite a big discount lowering the price to a level I am (more) comfortable with.

The only thing that makes me hesitate is that it has a 16:10 screen. I'd prefer a 16:9 as that is pretty much the de-facto standard aspect ratio overall, TVs and movies/TV-series are optimized 16:9 (as far as I know) etc.

I'd like to hear real world experiences of using 16:10 screens or laptops both for gaming, and general computing, and even watching movies (Netflix or whatever you watch) on it.

1. How widespread is native support for 16:10 resolutions in PC games, like (I think) 1920x1200 and such? Can you say that e.g. most PC games from the last 5-10 years support 16:10 resolutions just fine?

2. When a game does support 16:10 resolutions, does it just mean that it shows more stuff up and down, and less sideways (because the aspect ratio is narrower)? It never stretches the image vertically etc., a circle is still a perfect circle etc.?

3. When watching 16:9 (Full-HD or better) movies and TV-series on it, I guess you just get some black bars on the top and bottom of the screen?

4. Is there some kind of renaissance of 16:10 screens, as I seem to see quite a few laptops with 16:10 screens on the market nowadays? On the other hand, desktop PC monitors still seem to get just wider and wider, so is 16:10 mainly a laptop thing?

Anything else worth knowing?

PS. And no I do not need any "advice" how I should get a desktop PC instead. I can't take the desktop PC with me abroad, to my summer cottage etc., so it is out of question at this point.

OK, so first off, I don't have a 16:10 screen, so have limited real world experience of this. However, WSGF is a good resource here - while it has historically been used as a "does it support 16:9?" check during the switch to widescreen, now it has more on niche resolutions - such as superwide, eyefinitiy and 16:10. Most games have screenshots showing a variety of scenarios in resolutions - e.g. gameplay, pre-rendered and in-game cutscenes.

Take Wolfenstein: The Old Blood:

https://www.wsgf.org/dr/wolfenstein-old-blood/en

Looking at this, the game engine responds well to different aspect ratios as do in-game cut scenes. Pre-rendered FMV does stretch though (although is designed for 16:9, so you'll get letterboxing with 16:10). Wider than 16:9 stretch the image.

A bit highjacking your thread while i can't really comment on 16:10 gaming itself i recently helped a friend buying a highend gaming notebook with a RTX 3080 as well.
Did you do your "homework" regarding the different version of the mobile 3080s?
Like there is many different version regarding power levels (both base and boost) and you (in sense of max performance and also only if the cooling solution of the notebook is good) should generally try going for a 150W+ one (the 80W and 115W ones might even underperform the mobile 3070 cards sometimes)

Yeah I am aware there are different versions and power levels of it.

I am unsure which exactly it is, but since it seems to rate very good against other high-end (including RTX 3080) gaming laptops, I figure it has a pretty good power level.

It is the Lenovo Legion 7, if interested. The specs say the "THP"(?) for its GPU is 165W, if that tells you anything.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lbziu7_RJJA

Otherwise I wouldn't have considered it (due to high price mainly, I was thinking of buying some XMG Ryzen gaming laptop with RTX 3060 or 3070 instead), but now I'd get a pretty hefty discount for the Lenovo... And it has by default all those extra options I would have wanted to get anyway, like (minimum) 1TB SSD and 32GB RAM (to be future-proof; my experience is that the amount of RAM is the first thing that becomes an obstacle when any of my PCs start to age).

It still depends on the game. Some will provide only a hard-coded list of common resolutions (720p, 1080p, 1440p, etc), others will "read" available resolution and allow it. Others still can be modded, etc, 1080p might be the only visible option in-game but there could be a registry entry / config file where you can change 1080 to 1200. PCGamingWiki and WidescreenGamingForum are the best resources for this stuff. Stretching can always be avoided by having the GPU handle scaling then selecting "No scaling" or "Aspect ratio scaling" in nVidia drivers. As for content displayed, this also depends on the game as what you're describing is a similar but inverted issue to what Ultrawide owners experience:-

- If a game's FOV is locked to the vertical, you will see more content on-screen on 21:9 vs 16:9 1080p but less on 16:10 vs 16:9 (it will "crop and zoom" instead of showing more content)

- If a game's FOV is locked to the horizontal, you will see less content on-screen on 21:9 vs 16:9 1080p but more on 16:10 vs 16:9.

Some games it's possible to change this, eg, for Unreal 4 engine games you edit the engine.ini file and change:-

[/Script/Engine.LocalPlayer]
AspectRatioAxisConstraint=AspectRatio_MaintainYFOV to AspectRatioAxisConstraint=AspectRatio_MaintainXFOV

(You'd want YFOV for 21:9 but XFOV for 16:10). Yes. It's far better than stretching it and the bars are so thin for 16:9 content on 16:10 vs 16:9 you won't notice. For 21:9 content they'll be a little thicker than on 16:9 but for 4:3 content the "pillar-box" (vertical black bars) should be slightly thinner on 16:10 than 16:9. I don't really know what the percentages are. Ultrawide laptops aren't really a thing due to the form factor (eg, keyboard or the fact you actually want it to fit on your lap). :-)

To try and explain how games handle X vs Y FOV scaling better, here's some visual examples:-

FOVX game (fixed width, variable height):-
- Supraland (16:9) - https://i.imgur.com/ZRDHmMR.jpg
- Supraland (21:9) - https://i.imgur.com/Ni8YdxM.jpg

^ The width is the same on all monitors. You don't want this on Ultrawide (see how the vertical gets cropped) but you WOULD want this on 16:10 (more vertical content).

FOVY game (fixed height, variable width):-
- Bioshock Infinite (16:9) - https://i.imgur.com/8AZngmm.jpg
- Bioshock Infinite (21:9) - https://i.imgur.com/p3VVMXb.jpg

The height is the same on all monitors. You DON'T want this on 16:10 (no more height than 16:9) but you would want this on Ultrawide (more horizontal content).

For Unreal Engine 3-4 it's often possible to easily change which dimension the FOV calculation is based on, but for other games with non editable config files, you may need to resort to tricks like hex-editing files (works for some Unity Engine games). For other games, it's not possible, and for other (usually 2D) games they may scale both ways +X and +Y. Eg, Stardew Valley will simply show more on screen the more res you add, ie, show more width on Ultrawide and show more height on 1200p vs 1080p.

I tried 16:10 for a brief period in the past and.. I kinda liked it better than 16:9!
I found the latter always too short, compared to width, for my tastes.
Sadly it's not a very common resolution nowadays. :\

Yeah, my question was mainly that are laptop screens now for some reason adopting 16:10 increasingly (ie. becoming a bit narrower), while desktop monitors are going to the opposite direction, becoming wider? My question wasn't really whether there are laptops with ultrawide 32:9 screens etc. 16:9 still seems the most common also in laptops.

In the distant past I bought a 5:4 (1280x1024) PC monitor, and ended up regretting it. I guess it was an earlier example of some computer monitors momentarily going to "taller and narrower" for some reason, and being abandoned soon afterwards.

I know there have been 16:10 monitors (or at least laptops) also in the past, I think one of my older work laptops many years ago had a 16:10 screen as well. I thought they were gone already, but now I'm seeing some newer laptops having them again. Not sure why.

Anyway, what I got from your message was that 16:10 gaming quite often means either black bars on the top and the bottom, or having to manually edit some .ini files etc... so it might be I'll give it a pass then and keep looking for a laptop with a 16:9 screen (after all that makes the laptop keyboard also wider, leaving more room for a separate numpad etc.).

EDIT: Then again, a similarly specced XMG laptop (with a 16:9 screen) would cost me 822 euros more... Shit, do I really want to lose that much money, just for the 16:9 screen? Hard decisions to make... Naturally if I wait for a year or two, prices will come down, hopefully... So now I feel my options are either to take this deal, or wait another 1-2 years before buying a new gaming PC/laptop...

Phuck it, now I feel I try to get that deal, too good to pass even if I could continue living also without it...

If it is gone ie. someone else took it already while I was hesitating, I guess I can comfort myself with "well I wouldn't have wanted it anyways with its 16:10 screen"... :)

I'm a bit short on time so didn't read all the posts. Will do it later.

I have a 4:3 monitor (man cave) and 2 3:2 tablets, although no 16:10 monitor for years.
Most games will have black bars on other than 16:9 depending if scaling is enabled on the GPU control panel, usually setting ON makes things blurry.
Back in the day was very popular to setup Counter Strike resolution to 4:3 stretched in 16:9 displays. Not only the resolution was lower meaning more performance/fps, also the aim was improved due less vertical motion.


16:10 shines if you do a lot of text scrolling (website, code etc), since you gain more height than loose in width compared to 16:9.

On some widescreen movies you may loose half of the display though. To me it's kinda annoying but other people don't care. It's a bit like watching older series/movies made for 4:3 on modern 16:9 displays, the side black bars are so thick that I prefer watching on a smaller screen with suitable ratio.

I guess I can contribute later to this discussion, as I went ahead and bought the damn beast. Writing this on it at this very moment.

If 16:10 starts annoying me too much, I guess I will watch movies and play games using an external monitor with it, LOL!

While I am at it, I try to update Windows to 11 so I can contribute to that thread too... Maybe I will buy a second SSD to this too and install Linux Mint or Manjaro and use it dualboot.

Damn I had forgotten how annoying Cortana is. It wouldn't understand my heavy accent so I had to start talking like some fancy Hollywood celebrity. Tuu tii tu tööti tuu (= "Two tea(s) to thirty-two", a joke about a Finn ordering something to his hotel room when abroad).

Man oh man, I can't wait to try Cyberpunk etc. on this, games I wasn't expecting to be able to run even passably for some time...

There's no single answer here, it varies drastically from game to game. The Wide Screen Gaming Forum wiki is your friend here.

Most games allow you to choose the resolution in the settings, which aside from 16:10 is important because 21:9 monitors are a thing and ultra-widescreen gamers yell at you if you don't support those. Also first-person games typically have a FOV slider. Movies are definitely not optimized for 16:9 as the aspect ratios are usually 1.85:1 or 2.39:1, so you get black bars on 16:9. A lot of TV is usually 2:1 now (pretty much all streaming shows, and a few are even 2.39:1), so again: black bars. Since you often get black bars with video content anyway, on 16:10 the black bars are a bit bigger is all.

Isn't connecting a normal monitor to it a viable solution for you? At least for content where 16:9 is the better option. This is how I've used my laptop most of the time, extending the displays, not duplicating them. Also with mouse & keyboard plugged in.