This sucks bigtime.

[Mindjammer]

Apparently the G400 isn't capable of more than 2048 horizontal pixels. It just displays a column of pixels repeated across the screen.

And I was really hoping for 3200x2400 too. Ohwait, I can't do that, it needs a 400mhz RAMDAC. Well there's a 360 on the MAX so I can come close.

[Dyre]

Thats why it says, MAX Resolution: 2048 ....

[Maggi]

hmmm ... I have my desktop @ 2560x1024x32bpp (name it DH) ...

and say, which monitor would be capable of 3200x2400x32 @ how many Hertz you need ?

Cheers,
Maggi

[Mindjammer]

Any monitor that is capable of 1600x1200 non-interlaced at a decent refresh rate is capable of 3200x2400.

Increasing horizontal resolution has no effect on the monitor because the analog signal from the card is just outputted to the screen as the beam sweeps across. To take care of the vertical resolution go interlaced. 2400/2=1200. But you'd need a 400Mhz RAMDAC (for 81hz refresh rate) so either use a lower refresh rate or decrease the vertical resolution (and the horizontal to maintain aspect ratio but you don't HAVE to.)

You can do other resolutions with this trick - say on an 800x600 monitor go 1600x1200 interlaced. Video bandwidth (min required RAMDAC speed) increases with both horizontal and vertical resolution, while required horizontal refresh rate increases with vertical only. So you'll probably run into RAMDAC bandwidth problems tweaking with higher resolutions. Interlacing cuts both RAMDAC and horizontal refresh in half as you are outputting half as many lines to the screen.

I wouldn't use 32bit at this res. You won't tell the difference with 16bit anyway. Also you get FSAA for free, as the monitor "anti-aliases" the image for you. You have to decrease the res a bit to use 3D even on a 32mb card, you'll run out of room for the Z buffer.

Speculations: What it would be possible to do with a sufficiently advanced display system in the OS is on an 800x600 monitor you would set say 2400x600 or however high the card will let you go. This way you get 3x horizontal resolution which makes fonts look incredible - I've played with sub-pixel addressing on LCD screens but the CRT version will blow it away - it works in any condition not just white on black or vice versa! Plus you don't have to low-pass filter the fonts cos there are no color fringes! You'd just rescale images horizontally.

well, this is what happens when I try to post at 3:30 in the morning...

[Mindjammer]

Oh! forgot to tell you what all this is good for. Try switching to a really high res and then loading Word, maximize it, set it to "fit width". Type a bit in different fonts, you know the ones that look good on paper but not on screen. Observe the pure font awesomeness radiating from your computer screen. Mind your eyeballs don't fall out. Also good for PDF files with complex diagrams.

Another thought. With special hardware support it would be possible to have infinite horizontal resolution on a CRT. This would make fonts look really awesome, especially italics - they need it the most. Roman/Cyrillic type fonts benefit much more from horizontal resolution increases than they do vertical. Also another benefit of this is that 2x FSAA now gives better results than 4x did before.