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SuvwlQa's avatar
SuvwlQa
12 years ago
Solved

Screen Resolution Change - hard to describe

I took a break from ME3 a couple months ago and recently returned to a very unusual occurance that's not that easy to decribe so please bare with me here. When I played ME3 before (in fact I have al...
  • 1ago's avatar
    1ago
    12 years ago

    This seems to be a monitor issue instead of a Mass Effect / OS issue. Did you by any chance change monitors? Usually there should be a monitor setting of "pass through" or "no rescaling" or "native" in its menu so that the monitor won't scale the picture to fit the screen but outputs pixel-per-pixel (which would result in the black borders you described).

    Usually these distortions are due to a "fit-to-screen" setting. There may be a "fit-to-aspect-ratio" setting that should enlarge the picture, but not distort the aspect ratio.

1ago's avatar
1ago
12 years ago

This seems to be a monitor issue instead of a Mass Effect / OS issue. Did you by any chance change monitors? Usually there should be a monitor setting of "pass through" or "no rescaling" or "native" in its menu so that the monitor won't scale the picture to fit the screen but outputs pixel-per-pixel (which would result in the black borders you described).

Usually these distortions are due to a "fit-to-screen" setting. There may be a "fit-to-aspect-ratio" setting that should enlarge the picture, but not distort the aspect ratio.

SuvwlQa's avatar
SuvwlQa
12 years ago

Thank you for the response.

As far as I can remember I hadn't changed any settings on my computer in the 2 month span that I wasn't playing any of the Mass Effect games (I was playing TOR during that period).  The only thing that I did do was uninstall a few programs/games that I wasn't using anything.

How would I change switch the setting off of "fit-to-screen" or "fit-to-aspect-ratio" (which actually sounds more like the issue I'm having particularly with ME3) as I have Windows 7 and an ATI 4570 graphics card (Catalyst Control Center is installed)?

EDIT: Sorry forgot to mention that I'm on a laptop

EDIT#2: I found the area that covers it in the Catalyst Control Center but for some reason the option to change it is grayed out, not sure, gonna research it but does anybody know offhand why it would be that way and/or how to change it?

EDIT#3: I was able to change the settings however they were for the general computer and did nothing to change how the Mass Effect games were functioning.  The problem is localized with them and no other games that I have on my laptop are having this issue (TOR included).

Is there a way to adjust the centered/fullscreen/fit-to-aspect-ratio setting on a per game basis so that I can adjust the Mass Effect games back to what they were before whatever caused this to happened happened?

EDIT#4: I was able to get ME1 and 2 back to what they were, still trying to get ME3 to play nice...

  • 1ago's avatar
    1ago
    12 years ago

    It is greyed out because on the Desktop you have the maximum resolution that is already pixel-per-pixel. You have to lower it to the resolution you're using when playing Mass Effect in order to change it in the Catalyst Control Center and for the options to become available.

    • SuvwlQa's avatar
      SuvwlQa
      12 years ago

      Yeah I figured that part out soon after I typed it in, felt kinda dumb after for even asking it, lol.  I don't pretend to be the most knowledgable person with computers but I normally pick it up fast after it's explained, I digress though....

      Thanks to the help I was able to get ME1 and ME2 back to how I was playing them before but ME3 is seriously confusing me and it really seems like it was operating under multiple different settings before and I really wish I could have taken a picture of how everything was before so I could show you the side-by-side. 

      However I've gone through every setting possible and I simply cannot get around a particular problem that I'm having.  Prior to this problem I was playing on 1366X768 and on the screen during gameplay I would be able to see the entire upper half of Shepard's body down to just below the belt (If I had a shotgun I could clearly see it), now when I'm in 1366x768 the screen cuts off just below Shepard's chest (can only see the shotgun if I'm sprinting) as if the screen has somehow been zoomed in and the zoom-in is applying to the Menus as well as they are all closer in.

      The only way I can get the rest of Shepard in the screen now is to turn the resolution down to 1024x768 (thank you for helping it get unstretched btw) which also cuts down the cinematics and everything else.  Without any other way to describe it, it's as though (the way it used to be) the Main menu and loading screens were function in 1024x768 while the game was in some sort of zoomed out 1366x768.

      I don't know if I'm making sense, but if I am, did I have some random bug that permitted me to do what I'm describing and it got fixed somewhere along the line, or is it possible for a screen setting to become 'zoomed-in' (for lack of a better description) and if so, then how do I fix it?

      • 1ago's avatar
        1ago
        12 years ago

        Did you set the screen resolution ingame to 1366x768 via the ME3 config-tool (MassEffect3Config.exe under "Binaries" in the ME3 folder)? You can also change the modes there (widescreen, and if it should run in windowd-mode). Maybe that's somehow screwing with your picture. Did you by any chance mess with your Coalesced.bin?

        You can always use http://www.fraps.com/ to make a screenshot ingame, so that we can see what it looks like.

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