I have an NVIDIA 130M card on my laptop, and with a typical widescreen monitor. I play a few games on my laptop, and some of them run in a non-widescreen resolution, such as 800×600 for example.
My graphics card has an option to allow the display to stretch the game's resolution if it's in full screen to widescreen. Now, it looks fine and runs fine, seemingly no frames are lost and it looks as if the game ran in widescreen natively (albeit slightly blurry, but it doesn't detract from the quality).
My question is, does this cost extra processing power, or generate more heat, or put strain on the graphics card? Will playing in this manner cause any ill effects to my machine?
Best Answer
If possible, you should always run a game on the native resolution of a monitor (assuming it's an LCD of some kind, which your laptop is) as it will look "best".
That being said, there is absolutely no penalty, performance, heat, or otherwise for turning this option on. If it looks fine to you (I think it would drive me crazy), go ahead and do it.