Help me understand how to change resolution properly.

[RedAffinity]

Hello.

PC was very powerful, and ran the game at native resolution with no issues. PC died.
Laptop is quite powerful, but at native resolution of 1920x1080 the video card isn't quite powerful enough to support absolute perfect fps (this slows down targeting, and action bar navigation which in turn cripples my performance as a player in game)

tl;dr

If I lower resolution in settings, the game runs full screen but with black surrounding the sides. How do I make it stretch and be full screen but in lower resolution?

In advance, thanks for your help!

[Chrysomallos]

Sorry if this is also tl;dr..!

The reason the game is playing with the "black bars" on either side of your screen is due to the resolution you chose not being mathematically friendly with the actual dimensions of your monitor screen/the resolution your computer itself is set at. It's for the same reason that when we watch non-HD channels on an "HD" tv (or 1920x1080) that those black bars are there as well (unless your tv or provider has a setting in which you can "stretch" the picture, of course...), considering the resolution that the video was originally produced to be in was intended for older, smaller, "square-er" TVs.

I had the same issue as you with my laptop, and so I set it to 1366x768. This is because it's a resolution that's lower and friendlier on the FPS issue, and because I can see the text easier on my TV, haha. However, the other reason is that it divides evenly from 1920x1080.

To be more specific... We're going to use an equation a lot of people learn to find out what their percentage was on their school tests: dividing their score by the goal score, heh.

Divide 1366 (the length of one of the FFXIV resolution choices, and the one I chose) by 1920 (the length of your resolution). You'll find the result is 0.71 rounded off. Do the same with the height of both resolutions: 768/1080. It also equals 0.71.

So! 1920x1080 is 29% larger than 1366x768, as 0.71 means that the smaller resolution is 71% the size of the larger one. Sooo what, you say?

Try the same equation with another resolution - one that seems a little more "uneven" between the length and width. As another example, 1400x1050. In that situation, we'd again take the smaller length (1400), divide it by the wider (1920), and we would be given the result of 0.72. Again, so what? Well, do the same thing with the height. Smaller (1050) divided by larger (1080) is... 0.97!

This means that the length and height of the new resolution, 1400x1050, is not equally smaller to 1920x1080, our resolution. 1400 is 28% smaller, and 1050 is a meager 3% smaller. This is exactly what results in black bars. It's compensating for the amount of unequal space between your computer's settings/monitor, and the settings of the window within your monitor, so to speak.

So, just use that basic math trick to find which lower resolutions are "friendly", or even with yours, and you'll be good... as opposed to logging in and out after trying a new resolution each time to get rid of those pesky black bars. :x

[Mirage]

That's a lot of text to solve a problem that is relatively easy to solve.

Turn on display scaling in your video card's settings. For nVidia cards, this is here.

For AMD/ATI cards, I don't even remember because I haven't used those in years. It would be amazingly terrible if they didn't have a feature that did the same as nVidia can do. Just look around in the driver settings and you'll probably find it sooner or later.

Also, have you tried decreasing general and background drawing quality in the game's settings?
Lowering the drawing quality will result in the game rendering the 3D stuff at a lower resolution than the game's actual resolution. Because the 3D is what's hard on your laptop's GPU, this will increase performance by a lot. At the same time, your user interface will be drawn at a high resolution, keeping the chat log, menus and menu text, and other UI element at high resolution so that you can easily read them.

Example.
General/background drawing quality set to 1. Resolution still 1920x1080, but much easier on the GPU. You don't have to turn it all the way down to 1. Any reduction down from "standard" will increase performance.

In case you're curious, no, I do not run the game at these settings myself. I just turned it down to demonstrate the effect to you.

And damn, after all these edits, my post became almost as tl;dr as Chrysomallos' . I still believe I'm a bit more to the point, though .

[Shokun]

What dear Chrysomallos was explaining is, in short, the aspect ratio of your game's resolution is recommended to be the same as your screen's native resolution, otherwise stretching occurs and most often this is the reason lower-than-native resolutions look bad/funny, as it might break the textures that are already scaled/stretched by game engine to match the selected aspect ratio. Going down from 1920x1080, suitable resolutions would be 1600x900, 1366x768 and 1280x720.

//Aspect ratio for those is 16:9, for the reference.

[Mirage]

I doubt it would break textures that area already scaled in the game, but stretching the wrong aspect ratio to fill your entire screen will make certain things stick out like a sore thumb, like circular objects will appear oval, for example.

Anyway, just messing around with drawing quality settings will probably solve his problem, unless he is CPU limited, which could be a problem on a laptop, especially if he's in uldah with lots of other players around.

[RedAffinity]

The CPU is an i7 Quad core
the video card is an Nvidia GT 640M and I believe that's the issue.

Anyway I changed the drawing quality down, the game looks muddy in comparison to the crystal clear sharp textures before but runs very smoothly. It's a temporary fix until 2.0 comes out and I believe my specs will be more than enough to run at decent settings with less sacrifice

[RedAffinity]

That's a lot of text to solve a problem that is relatively easy to solve.

Turn on display scaling in your video card's settings. For nVidia cards, this is here.

For AMD/ATI cards, I don't even remember because I haven't used those in years. It would be amazingly terrible if they didn't have a feature that did the same as nVidia can do. Just look around in the driver settings and you'll probably find it sooner or later.

Also, have you tried decreasing general and background drawing quality in the game's settings?
Lowering the drawing quality will result in the game rendering the 3D stuff at a lower resolution than the game's actual resolution. Because the 3D is what's hard on your laptop's GPU, this will increase performance by a lot. At the same time, your user interface will be drawn at a high resolution, keeping the chat log, menus and menu text, and other UI element at high resolution so that you can easily read them.

Example.
General/background drawing quality set to 1. Resolution still 1920x1080, but much easier on the GPU. You don't have to turn it all the way down to 1. Any reduction down from "standard" will increase performance.

In case you're curious, no, I do not run the game at these settings myself. I just turned it down to demonstrate the effect to you.

And damn, after all these edits, my post became almost as tl;dr as Chrysomallos' . I still believe I'm a bit more to the point, though .

Btw I don't have those options in my Nvidia control panel. I see only a few of the tabs to the left but not even half of what's in that picture. This laptop has hybrid graphics so I believe there's an Intel 4000 in there along with this 640M so maybe some of the settings are on the Intel side but when playing XIV I think the Nvidia is what's trying to run the show.