To the joy of many gamers, and chagrin of others, the mandatory New Xbox Experience or “NXE” update has been released. The first thing you’ll notice with the NXE is its radical depature from the well-established “blade” layout the Xbox has been known for, instead replacing the UI with a slick, Cover Flow-esque look. While the NXE introduces a plethora of new features, one that has many gamers excited is support for 1680 x 1050 monitors.
The Xbox 360 was heralded as the first “true” HD console and led many to invest in their first HDTVs. However, most regular computer monitors are capable of displaying HD images as well, and thus, Microsoft released the Xbox 360 VGA HD AV Cable to allow gamers to connect their 360s to their monitors. However, several gamers who owned monitors with native resolutions of 1680 x 1050 were left in the cold. This is no longer the case … sort of.
With the NXE, Microsoft introduced support for two new resolutions: 1440 x 900 and 1680 x 1050. While I was looking forward to the NXE for many reasons, the overriding reason was the 1680 x 1050 support. Upon updating my 360 to the NXE, I immediately changed my monitor resolution to 1680 x 1050 and, to my dismay, was met with an image sandwiched between two black bars and, more importantly, with jagged edges. Now, I had no qualms with the black bars (they’re quite thin). In fact, they’re pretty much unavoidable since 360 games are made to support 16:9 and 1680 x 1050 is 16:10. What did bother me was the fact that some of the images on the screen were not sharp.
I am using a Dell Ultrasharp 2007WFP 20-inch monitor, which looks great when I play PC games like Crysis, but when I play certain 360 games, it introduces all kinds of anti-aliasing issues. Cel-shaded games don’t seem to have much of a problem, but when I play more realistic games, things start to take a turn for the worse. Granted, this probably is an issue with my monitor and I will continue to tweak the settings, but at least for now, it looks like the 1680 x 1050 support will not be the solution I was looking forward to so much. Luckily, there’s a whole lot more to the NXE that I will be able to explore in the coming days, so be sure to check back soon for updated impressions of this major update.
Filed under: Microsoft, Video Games, Xbox 360 Tagged: | 1680 x 1050, HD, New Xbox Experience
sucks to be you i have a 1680 x 1050 monitor and looks sharp no jaggs
It is a shame that they couldn’t fully add a full screen 1680 x 1050, having to opt for a slightly shorter screen size with the added black bars to “letterbox” the screen. At least now I won’t have that annoying vertical stretch in my games now. I have a Samsung SyncMaster 2232BW, just FYI, and all images seem crisp… for now. I’m about to try out Gears of War or something to see how it looks in game.
I have the exact same problem on my 1680 x 1050 LG
I’ve been looking forward to this for so long but using this res now on my 360 looks terrible, much worse than 1360×768 even tho thats not my native.
This was the last straw. When GTA IV comes out for PC I’m selling my xbox360. Console gaming will never look as good as PC.
I connect my Xbox 360 to my 1680×1050-capable TFT (Samsung 215TW, but I think this doesn’t matter) by using HDMI, I can confirm this behaviour. It doesn’t look like native 1680×1050 in PC games. Maybe it’s 1280×720 scaled up to 1680×1050? (With added black bars to keep the correct aspect ratio)
[...] dashboard update made 1680×1050 an option but the quality isn't too good from what I have heard. http://tektodo.com/2008/11/19/xbox-3…s-1680-x-1050/ __________________ Using a quad core with Linux is like putting a V8 on a tricycle. Mobile GPU [...]