PGR3 Hates My Monitor

[gta3freak_2001]

I've recently bought the VGA cable so I can have my 360 through my PC monitor, its been fine so far. TDU looks brilliant, the Dead Rising and Just Cause Demos look fab as well but we come to PGR3 and I have a problem.

The game loads fine, menus come up all that is fine but when I go to say test drive one of my cars the game decides to stretch the screen to full size as in the usual black bands above and below are gone. This as you can guess causes the screen anything on it to be squashed so cars look like cartoon variations and everything is just too tall and not wide enough. I've got the 360 running at the resolution my PC monitor supports and I've got it set to Normal as opposed to Widescreen. The monitor is a BenQ FP7G1+S and as I said all other games work fine and keep the black borders since its not a wide-screen monitor.

[Tap Twist Snap]

I don't have a solution for you but I can guess the reason is that PGR3 is a game that upscales the image for higher resolutions. If you reduce the res your 360 is running in when you play it it might help. My best guess.

[Big Col]

This is a widely-known problem that bizarre/MS seem to think isn't their problem and refuse to fix. If you're using a VGA cable and a monitor you have to use a resolution of either 640x480, 800x600 or 1024x768. Any other resolution will cause the image to stretch when in the game.

It's bloody annoying having to change my display settings every time i want to play PGR3.

[gta3freak_2001]

Ah righto, well that sucks since anything lower then my LCD's native res and things get a bit blurry but I'd rather have that then this distorted view I've got now.

[VANDETTA]

Can run a 360 via a computer LCD monitor without a computer? is it just plug and play?

[devil.03]

Yes you can hook it up to a monitor, even if it's not hooked up to a computer...

[samueljay]

hmm thats really wierd I don't get this problem when i play PGR3, could it be because my monitor is widescreen?

[gta3freak_2001]

Possibly yeah, anyway even on 1024x768 the game still is squashing things so things are slightly more narrow then they should be. If I drop the res to 640x480 the game looks like a blurry mess which is what you get when you run a res other then an LCD's native one.

It seems to me it comes from the fact that PGR3 was made to work just as well on a non-HD TV and with that it mucks up the VGA thing. The reason I say this is because PGR3 looks just as good on my LCD as it does on my shitty little TV(apart from text being a problem) whereas games like Dead Rising and TDU look alot better on my LCD.

[Big Col]

Nah its not because of that. It's because the developers cheated on PGR3 and the game actually runs at 600p resolution, and is then upscaled to 720p. So if the native resolution on your lcd monitor (and in some cases HDTV) doesnt like the game doing that it will result in a strected picture or extreme jaggy lines.

I think that's why they havent fixed the issue either, because if they changed the game to run at 720p resolution (instead of 600p) the framerate would take a dive.

[CindiXduroNeoBatty]

Turn off PAL 60?

[gta3freak_2001]

Turn off PAL 60?
You can't change that when you use VGA.

[jum]

I just bought myself a viewsonic 20.1" vx2025wm lcd monitor and i dont have any issues with PGR3, it runs fantastic as do the rest of my games, maybe its because its widescreen but it leaves for dead the 1080i res i had been using on my big tv, i highly recomend this monitor.