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Okay, 1280x800 is 16:10 and 1680x1050 is 16:10, so from that, the 1280x800 resolution should be able to fill the screen of a 1680x1050 monitor as it has the same aspect ratio.

However, when I try to use 1280x800 I get a letterboxed image. The screen is stretched to the left and right, but not to the top and bottom. (For reference, my only reason for using 1280x800 is in trying to eke out a little extra performance in gaming from my now 6 year old machine). This letterboxing appears in the desktop and in games.

To investigate further I decided to go into my GPU control panel (I have an nvidia GTX260). If I customize the view then I can get a preview of what the screen image will look like. There are three options for scaling - aspect ratio, fullscreen and no scaling. I've attached screenshots of these different settings.

The first one, using aspect ratio, shows that the 1280x800 resolution leaves the top and bottom with black bars (letterboxed). But why?

The second one, no scaling, gives an identical letterboxing.

The third one, fullscreen, shows it filling the screen as desired.

So, any ideas as to why 1280x800 does not fill a 1680x1050 16:10 monitor screen by default? Is it, by any chance, a non-square pixel resolution?
Attachments:
This question / problem has been solved by DreadMothimage
Further playing with settings seems to show that it is the display itself that does the incorrect scaling. When set to use the GPU for scaling the image fills the screen in 1280x800.

Is this normal?
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korell: Further playing with settings seems to show that it is the display itself that does the incorrect scaling. When set to use the GPU for scaling the image fills the screen in 1280x800.

Is this normal?
Yeah monitors/HDTVs can be iffy like this. my el cheapo 55" doesn't scale movies (anything at wider than 16/9) properly when played through it but my computer and media hub can scale them properly for it.
Maybe your monitor is misinterpreting the resolution as 720p HD (1280x720) because of the width of 1280 pixels and therefore scales wrongly (16:9 instead of 16:10). Hence you'd see black bars on top and bottom of your native 16:10 screen.
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korell: Further playing with settings seems to show that it is the display itself that does the incorrect scaling. When set to use the GPU for scaling the image fills the screen in 1280x800.

Is this normal?
Is it an HDTV? When a friend of mine plugged her laptop into her TV and chose the TV's native resolution it still decided, rather bizarrely, to zoom in on the picture a bit giving an effect a bit like overscan on a CRT. Went into the menu and chose something like "full" as the display mode. Your problem doesn't sound the same, but sometimes displays have weird default settings.
It's usually better to have the GPU do the upscaling anyway - better quality than many monitor scalers and can reduce input lag.
I don't know what monitor you have, or when it was made, or any of that, but it's not unheard of for a monitor's horizontal, and vertical size and positioning settings to be unique per resolution. So if that particular resolution is not properly adjusted then you might try adjusting it in your monitor's menu and see what happens. Which usually means being in that resolution at the time.

I think devices are better these days about sorting it out, but it kinda depends.
The monitor I have is a Samsung SyncMaster 2032BW. It is a computer monitor, not a HDTV, and it uses a DVI cable.

Using the GPU scaling in the nvidia Control Panel seems to work fine, though.