EDID causing monitor distortion

[Jadrian]

I have a monitor with a native 3840x1080 60hz resolution. I am unable to play the game due to the way the game reads the EDID instead of the resolution itself. This makes my character look like a walking hamburger. I have attempted to fix it using various methods on this forum. However with no success. It seems the only option I have left is to plead with the devs to modify the way the game determines resolution so that the EDID isn't required. I truly hope this can be achieved as I really love this game but have not played in over a year because of this issue. Thank you!

[Jadrian]

I just got a reply back from the monitor manufacturer (VIOTEK) and apparently my monitor doesn't have a driver written for it.

 

I am very sorry to hear about this happening. Our monitors are plug and play models and do not have any specific drivers.

 

That being the case, I don't see them being of any help in this matter. I've tried everything I can possibly think of at this point. The only thing that came close to working was setting it in picture beside picture mode and then enabling nvidia surround. Even though the resolution is displayed properly this way, one side of the monitor displays with different picture settings then the other creating a huge distracting difference from one side of the screen to the other (looks like a before and after picture).

 

The only way I've found to play this game at all is to set my aspect ratio to 1:1 and set the ingame resolution to 1920x1080. That creates a single monitor appearance in the middle of my ultra-widescreen. It's totally not ideal but it's playable. I find this absolutely ridiculous though that this is the only game that I've loaded up that has this issue on my display. Every other game I have has at the very least, some kind of workaround that allows me to play in my monitor's native resolution. Please fix this. Being an online game with no true support for UWS is really bizarre these days.

[SteveTheCynic]

It's your monitor, not the game. Defective EDID information is a plague on PC (and other computer) users that is, fortunately, pretty rare(1). The manufacturers will almost never acknowledge it as a specimen fault, so the best we can do is cobble together a compatible .inf file which you then install instead of the one that Windows fabricates from the EDID. There are third-party tools that will help you do this.

 

For reference, I have a pair of Samsung E28E570 4K screens which just work, in full 3840x2160, with SWTOR.(2)

 

As an alternative, try Windowed Full-screen (or "Full-screen (Windowed)" or whatever it's called), where the game will pick up the resolution from the Windows desktop size.

 

(1) I've had this stuff in the past. Way back when, I had a Samsung 1920x1080p that swore blind that it wasn't capable of better than 1024x768. Fortunately, I had a second PC with the same model of screen (but a correct EDID), and was able to copy the .inf file from that PC to the other and force the correct size.

 

(2) It probably doesn't make any difference that they are connected by DisplayPort rather than HDMI. And SWTOR coped nicely during the week when I only had one of them connected, with the secondary monitor being 1920x1080 on HDMI. (That is, I was playing on the 4K screen *in*4K* while the other wasn't capable of 4K.)

[SteveTheCynic]

Secondary note: monitors don't, as such, have drivers in the way that USB controllers, graphics cards, network adapters, and such have drivers. Those things require actual code (even if it's provided by the operating system) to make them work.

 

Monitors just need information that lets the system know what the monitor can do, and how to configure the graphics card to do it. In full plug-and-play monitors (pretty much all of them these days), the system reads the EDID and generates that information dynamically. Well, except that sometimes the EDID is defective, and the system applies the GIGO principle(1), and generates nonsense.

 

(1) Garbage In, Garbage Out.