HD Monitor and HD Graphics Card

[pauloz!]

Hey guys i'm a little stumped. I got a 22" HD Monitor (it had HDCP or HDMI on the box - i can't really remember) and an ATI HD 3870 graphics card. Currently i have them hooked up via a DVI connection from both the 3870 to the monitor. When i first got my PC, i just connected them, installed the ATI drivers and CCC and set the resolution i wanted.

My question is, how can i fully take advantage of the fact that these two things are HD?? How can i get the clearest image??

To be honest i have my desktop resolution at 1440x900 and i usually play games at 1680x1050 and it is pretty clear but do i have to change any settings in CCC or anything like that to fully enjoy HD or am i already doing the right thing just by hooking them up??

In CCC i see a setting for HDTV but nothing really about the HD monitor but i know the monitor is HD.

Also in CCC there are settings about GPU scaling. I have no idea what GPU scaling is, but the monitor seems a little clearer when it's off...

Thanks for your answers.

[directhex]

Why is your desktop resolution set wrong? LCD screens have an *exact* number of pixels - no matter what resolution you set your app to use, what's being displayed is displayed using the monitor's physical resolution. Any mismatch needs to be fixed using often poor-quality scaling and filtering chips, leading to blurriness

[pauloz!]

^^^What do you mean my desktop resolution is set wrong? Are you talking about native/max resolution? If i do set it to my max resolution, it's just way too small and my eyes are really bad as it is and that is why i have it currently at 1440x900.

[Will404]

He means that the monitor is designed to run at a resolution of 1680*1050, and as there are 1680 pixels accross, and 1050 pixels from top to bottom, then running it at 1440*900 means that you have each pixel on the monitor displaying 1.167 of the pixels windows is sending it. This dose not work, so pretty much 1 in every 8 (or so) pixels from windows is being streatched accross two of the monitors pixels, causing the image to blur.

Or something like that anyway.

You can set the font to large in the settings if you want, so you can run it on 1680*1050, with 120DPI fonts instead of 96DPI.

You can do this by (windows vista)

Start-->Control pannel-->Ease of access centre-->Optomise visual display-->Change the size of text and icons-->Larger scale.

little piccy to help: