War Thunder forces stretched scaling in fullscreen modes

Community Technical Support
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1

I play War Thunder on a 32:9 ultrawide monitor with a 5120x1440 resolution. War Thunder goes into a different view mode at resolutions beyond 27:9 which restricts vertical FOV.

This restriction greatly hampers my situational awareness in ground battles where I need to maintain eyes on the sky, so I set a custom resolution in my config.blk file that is two pixels narrower than what a 27:9 resolution would be on my monitor — 4318:1440 — and set config.blk to “read-only” such that it wouldn’t change it back on me without asking first.

This worked for me for the longest time, without issue — but when I booted up War Thunder today, the game felt the need to apply stretch scaling to fill out the screen, which I think looks just awful. I have tried everything in the usual toolbox to try and fix this:

  1. I double-checked my NVIDIA Control Panel settings, and indeed, they are still set correctly (Aspect ratio scaling, on GPU, override scaling mode set by games). I also double-checked
  2. I double-checked my config.blk file, nothing has changed
  3. I unchecked read-only on the file, booted up War Thunder, changed my resolution a few times, and repeated the config.blk adjustments — still stretched scaling

I’m out of tools, at this point. I’m wondering if anyone else has run into this problem or has any potential fixes they could suggest? Thanks in advance.

2

Alright, all, I’ve deduced a method — albeit not an ideal one — to attain the desired resolution.

It seems that the monitor, in my case a Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 32:9 5120x1440 240hz monitor, does not want to allow custom resolutions at 240hz. Here is the step-by-step process:

  1. In the monitor’s built-in controls menu, change the refresh rate to 120hz
  2. In the NVIDIA Control Panel, navigate to “Change Resolution” and scroll down to the “Customize” button, which should no longer be grayed out, as it was at 240hz.
  3. Create a custom resolution two pixels smaller than 21:9, in this case, 4318x1440
  4. Accept and run War Thunder in fullscreen windowed mode

This will, of course, result in a performance hit, but at least on my machine, I’m not running War Thunder much beyond 120hz anyways. I found the end result satisfactory, though it does require a few preceding steps to make it happen.

If anyone else has a better solution, one similar to how it used to work, please let us know!!