ZFR: Unfortunately though, for many games made at the beginning of this decade, 16:10 would actually give you a smaller FOV than 16:9. If you compare 1920x1200 vs 1920x1080, then you'll see that instead of giving you the extra vertical FOV that the addtional 120 pixels could provide, the game would instead reduce the horizontal POV (and then "stretch" the image). Exceptions existed in non-3D games, where the extra 120 pixels would give you a larger view, but for most 3D games, if you had a 1920x1200 monitor, you were better off switching to 1920x1080 and playing with horizontal black bars.
There was a thread here with images, but they're gone now.
https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/gaming-monitor-1920x1200-vs-1920x1080.160894/#post-2554618 This, as I said was at the beginning of this decade. I haven't played any games made in the last 0-2 years, so not sure how they're made now.
So you're saying there are buggy games out there. I'd have to agree.
FOV is sometimes configurable in-game although that's unusual in general other than using a game's console commands normally (if it has one), but it is also sometimes configurable by editing a .ini file or similar for someone that is bothered by it enough to want to change it.
Personally I've experienced extremely few problems with games running them on 16:10 monitors ever. If something doesn't look right, I'll tweak a game's settings until it does or even tweak my monitor or video driver's stretching functionality if need be, but that's extremely rare. There are some games I've had to run at other aspect ratios due to limitations and tradeoffs. For example I could either run Tomb Raider 1 at a higher resolution in 4:3 with black side borders, run it 4:3 and stretch it to fill the screen via monitor or video driver settings, or run it in the proper aspect ratio but at a slightly lower resolution. After experimenting with all of the options I decided for that game to go high res 4:3 with black borders. I did not however painstakingly tear google apart, but there might have been a way to get it to work in my native resolution or in 1920x1200 perhaps if I was persistent enough.
The problem you describe is much more common I've found using multi-head, in particular triple-head. Mount and Blade, and Battle for Middle Earth 2 both have FOV / map scaling issues when you throw unexpected resolutions at them that are very different from the way they were designed.
Pulling numbers out of my ass though, in my 13 years of experience using 16:10 monitors exclusively, 99.9% of games work flawlessly and any that don't are very rare exceptions that can usually be tweaked slightly via a trip to Google and some hand editing config files or similar. I definitely would not tell someone "stick with 16:9 if you want the best compatibility" because the difference is extremely marginal enough that the majority of people are unlikely to ever encounter any issues at all that aren't easily worked around or resolved.
16:10 Master Race(TM) :)
