Please help - display is stretched out of aspect ratio to fill screen

I have a HP Pavillion G6 1331 laptop, and it's great, except if a game is run in a non-widescreen resolution, then the laptop automatically stretches the game's screen to fill the physical screen, which is ugly and sort of throws off your aiming in first person shooters. I know the obvious answer is to run the games in widescreen mode, but not ever game supports this, so how can I force the laptop to keep non-widescreen resolutions in their correct aspect ratio, so that there are black borders down the sides of the screen if, say, the game runs in 4:3 800x600?

Thanks.

 

Solved! I've found two working solutions, both from the same forum thread ( ATI GPU Scaling Fix for Windows 7 - Guru3D.com Forums ).


Solution 1

Use the program that is linked to in that thread, although the link itself is dead, but I found it at Index of /downloads/ATIGPUScalingFix-Win7 (to find other links, google "ATIGPUScalingFix"). You have to keep this program running in the background, but it does stop the G6 1331 from setting everything to full widescreen.


Solution 2

[Quoted from that web page]

"ATI's solution as far as I've read about it was to have it grayed out unless a resolution lower than native was used, later on the ability to enable and disable scaling was added back but the modes remain locked, lowering resolution, altering the options and then setting it back should work although it'll gray out again, main issue with this for me is for older titles using lower resolutions, no way to set scaling mode with that method although ATI's solution is fine for desktop usage and similar.
(I can't remember where I read this but I think it was a post on ATI's forum from a moderator, fairly certain I've seen it explained on that Catalystmaker tweet as well.)"

I've just done this, and it worked. For some reason, the first time didn't take, so I did it again, and it worked. What I did was


a) Take the laptop's screen resolution down from 1366 x 768 to the next lowest (1360 x 768, I don't know why they bothered adding a resolution that was so extremely slightly lower than the next one up, but still...).

b) Go to the AMD Vision Engine Control Center > My Built in Displays > Properties (Built in Display). The scaling options are no linger greyed out (as they are when the laptop is at it's normal, maximum , resolution), and in fact there's a new option, Centered. I selected Centered, and of course applied the setting.

c) Then I changed the screen resolution back to 1366 x 768. The scaling options in the AMD Vision Engine Control Center are now greyed out again (and wrongly show full screen mode as being set, strangely), but the laptop no longer streches everything to full screen, and so far, every game I've tried has kept to it's native aspect ratio.


So thanks to king-dubs for the first solution, and JonasBeckman for the second.

 

Funny. I've had to do [Solution 2] on my notebook even though it has nVIDIA graphics because scaling options weren't selectable as well.