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by caylus 1385 days ago
I'm not sure how the math works for 3D games, but I would think that for 2D games, a curved monitor actually reduces distortion.

In a flat monitor centered in front of your head, the distance between your eyes and different pixels on the screen varies depending on how close they are to the edge, thus distorting the sizes of the rendered sprites. Curving the edges reduces this effect (depending of course on the exact curvature and distance to the monitor).

I guess the key question for 3D is whether the rendering engine already attempts to compensate for this effect. It seems difficult for it to do so, since monitor sizes and distances vary so much, but I suppose that's what settings like field-of-view are for.

1 comments

> In a flat monitor centered in front of your head, the distance between your eyes and different pixels on the screen varies depending on how close they are to the edge, thus distorting the sizes of the rendered sprites. Curving the edges reduces this effect (depending of course on the exact curvature and distance to the monitor).

That’s the same distortion that we encounter for all real-world objects all the time, and process automatically. We can’t turn that off, so I’m not sure it makes sense to try and compensate for it.

For 3D games, we’re trying to trick ourselves that we’re looking into a window. Curving the screen gives us a bigger window without a bigger monitor.

But 2D games are usually representing a flat surface intentionally.

EG: Mario runs to the right. Rendering it to a curved screen without correction suggests that he’s instead running clockwise around the viewer. For big enough stages, it brings into question why he doesn’t loop back on himself.

Correcting for that would mean shrinking things on the sides of the screen – effectively rendering to a flat surface behind the curved monitor.