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Performance as Computer Gaming Display

Gaming was a bit more of a mixed bag. Some games supported wide screen resolutions out of the box, notably UT2k4, Wolfenstein Enemy Territory, the Far Cry Demo and Max Payne 2 while others had no support for Wide Screen resolutions whatsoever including Sim City 4 and Need for Speed Underground. (Need for Speed Underground was limited to 1024x768 as its maximum resolution). Other games took more work to get working including Halo, Quake 3 and Call of Duty. The wide screen resolution of 1280x768 was not listed in the resolution menu so one has to be familiar with the console commands to do a custom height and width so widescreen support is not exactly user friendly. Ultimately it seems to be a developer specific thing as Enemy Territory is also a Q3 engine based game like Quake 3 and Call of Duty yet it was the only one of the three that supported wide screen resolutions without archaic commands.

It was disappointing to see other games like Need for Speed not supporting wide screen resolutions. With the way that 3D applications are written, it is fairly trivial to add support for different aspect ratios (note that 1280x1024 is not a standard 4:3 ratio like 800x600, 1024x768 and 1600x1200). This is a bit different for sprites in 2D games so the resolution support issue is more of a concern down there. If the game does not support a widescreen resolution the end user is left with the choice of either playing the game with the graphics stretched a bit wider or changing the settings on the 173MW to a letterbox type format with black bars on the side.

The faults outlined here are really out of Samsung's control and the onus is on game producers to support different aspect ratios better but this is the classic Catch-22; it will not be a priority for developers to support wide screen modes as they make up an insignificant portion of the market. The main issue is that there should be no reason why developers should not support this though as there is very little work that has to be done in order to support a different resolution/aspect ratio in a 3D game. 2D / sprite based games are a different story as we outlined above.

The 173MW being a 25ms screen performs like one and ghosts quite a bit especially on shooters. On other games like Need For Speed Underground, the ghosting effect was not nearly as bad. In any case, the hardcore gamer crowd may want to shy away from the LCD although this is coming from someone who is particularly picky when it comes to displays.