The first part, 1920 in our example, tells us how many pixels the monitor displays horizontally, whilst the second part, 1080, indicates the number of pixels it will use vertically. When you look at the specification of a new screen or monitor it will generally list the resolution as something like 1920 x 1080, this is a literal description of the number of pixels that a screen uses to make the picture or output you see. Now that we know what a pixel is we need to relate this to a monitor resolution. Hundreds of thousands of pixels combine together to create the pictures that you see when you look at a screen. When we talk about the resolution of a monitor or screen what we are actually discussing are the pixels which make up the picture that you see when you look at a screen.Ī pixel is a tiny dot of light, monitors have a lot of pixels packed tightly together and they can control the colour of each pixel individually. What Does the Screen Resolution Term Actually Mean? For this reason I’ve put together this guide which will hopefully help you understand the differences between resolutions and let you make the best choice for your next screen purchase. That being said I still regularly talk to customers who don’t fully understand what the resolution of a screen is and what impact it would make to them. I would put forward the view that screen resolution is one of the most important factors you could consider and it will make a definite impact on you whole experience of using your computer. Use GPU scaling to override monitor behaviour.When choosing a new monitor there are a few key considerations to take into account, most people first look at the physical size of a screen, often price is a factor but something that can be overlooked is the resolution of the screen. Some may stretch the image, while others may instead pillarbox. If a full-screen game is rendered at the wrong aspect ratio, the effects vary based on the monitor.

Most games today will feature built in support for widescreen resolutions, while some games may require tweaking to force such a resolution. Widescreen resolutions can cause problems with older games that were built for a 4:3 (1.33:1) screen, resulting in either a stretched screen or black bars of unused screen space.

The majority of computer monitors and TV's produced today are widescreen, and thus feature a native widescreen resolution.

Widescreen resolutions are resolutions that are of a 16:9 (1.78:1 more common) or 16:10 (1.60:1 slightly less common) aspect ratio. For a list of games, see games with widescreen resolution support.

Monitor resolutions list