ATI GPU Scaling Fix for Windows 7 (stretch and aspect ratio problems)

[662b5692f0dd7JDoran]

**  Warning - solution 1 might not work any more, and solution 2 might only work partially. This seems to be down to an automatic update for Windows that has altered (hidden, more like) the stretch flag in the registry. For details see my later post, three posts down in this thread.  **


Since Kolya posted about a graphical problem with his laptop (https://www.systemshock.org/index.php?topic=4075.0) I thought I'd post about a similar(ish) problem I've had, in case the solution helps anyone else. Last year I bought a HP G6 1331 with running Windows 7, and when I tried to run some games, they were wrongly stretched (aspect wise) or left black borders when the image could have been stretched whilst still keeping in the correct aspect ration. Obviously the aspect ratio setting of the GFX card (AMD Radeon HD 6620G + 7450M Dual GPU) needed adjusting, but, er, the setting was greyed out. Don't you just love it when software treats you like an idiot and won't let you set things up as you like?

Anyway, Google showed this was a common problem when Windows 7 was run with an AMD/ATI GFX card, as for some reason unimaginable to every disgruntled user who complained of the problem, the writers of the AMD/ATI driver software had decided to not allow the user to set the GPU Scaling options, as long as THE CURRENT GRAPHICAL RESOLUTION WAS THE SAME AS THE NATIVE GRAPHICAL RESOLUTION OF THE MONITOR (be it a laptop monitor or an external monitor connected to a desktop). Seriously, for some reason that would baffle Sherlock Holmes, they restricted you from altering the GPU Scaling options if your current resolution was set at the optimal resolution as dictated by the hardware!!!

I've found two working solutions, both from the same forum thread (  http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=312794  ).


Solution 1

Use the program that is linked to in that thread, although the link itself is dead, but I found it at http://media.mymtw.com/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. And I hope that helps anyone else who comes across this strange and seemingly ridiculous problem.

[662b5692f0fa1Keith M]

Thank you so much for this!

Somewhere along the way my laptop developed this problem, maybe a driver update or something. I couldnt play any of my games and after going through every setting short of the registry, I was about to give up. I knew it was a scaling issue but there were no settings available to change. Its pretty much a welfare level ATI card. A couple of clicks and it was sorted. 

[662b5692f10a7Shahid Noor]

Thanks a ton. I was looking for the solution from a longer time. Now It is working very correctly. Thanks again.

[662b5692f13ffJDoran]

Awful, awful news regarding this problem.

Yesterday I heard a work colleague describing a problem like  this one (his laptop was stretching games out of aspct ratio), and it turns out his laptop (which is a Hewlett Packard with an ATI Radeon GFX card, too) had the same problem as I had. So I said no problem, installed the ATIGPUScalingFix program, and, er, it didn't fix the problem. I tried again, nothing, so I got my laptop out (which has the problem fixed, it's the laptop I wrote about in the first post in this thread) to compare hardware/Windows settings/etc, but the program no longer worked on my laptop either. I mean the program that was already on the laptop, of course, the install that had fixed the problem and not been altered since.

Anyway, a mate of mine had had the same problem (and what do you know, it's also a Hewlett Packard laptop, with a Radeon card...) which I'd fixed with the ATIGPUScalingFix program. So I went round his house to check and sure enough, his laptop had reverted to having the problem again. He'd not altered anything, and in fact he'd not run any games on it in weeks. And I've not run any games on mine in a few months (I don't like gaming on a laptop), and I haven't altered any settings that would have effected ATIGPUScalingFix, and I haven't upgraded or altered the graphics driver, but it turns out that the Windows registry key that ATIGPUScalingFix alters no longer exists in Windows (and my creating it achieves nothing). All three machines (all three are Hewlett Packard laptops, with Radeon cards) now fail to respond to ATIGPUScalingFix, which isn't surprising given that Microsoft have apparently renamed or split up the registry entry for whatever reason I can't imagine.

So solution 1 (the ATIGPUScalingFix program) is now useless. Solution 2 does sort of work, but of the three options it gives you to choose from, only the bottom two (stretch to full wide-screen regardless of how badly it messes up the aspect ration, and show with the proper aspect ratio but with no stretching as all so it's a strict 1:1 pixel to screen ratio) work, the top option, the one we want (stretch everything but keep the aspec ratio) can be selected, but when you Apply or OK it, it reverts back to whatever it was set to before. The quick mess about I had with the registry before I gave up in the "I hate PCs/Windows/Microsoft" mood that so often bogs down us Windows users did nothing to help.

I might format my laptop and reinstall Windows 7 (with no updates) to see if ATIGPUScalingFix works OK again, which if so would 99% confirm it's a Windows update problem (I'm sure nothing else could have altered things, but with Windows you can never be 100% sure), but I'm not that bothered as I don't like gaming on a laptop anyway.

One thing I do know is that I'm not at all likely to buy another laptop from HP, or one that has a Radeon card in it.

[662b5692f1a70Ndrake]

Awful, awful news regarding this problem.
Solution 2 does sort of work, but of the three options it gives you to choose from, only the bottom two (stretch to full wide-screen regardless of how badly it messes up the aspect ration, and show with the proper aspect ratio but with no stretching as all so it's a strict 1:1 pixel to screen ratio) work, the top option, the one we want (stretch everything but keep the aspec ratio) can be selected, but when you Apply or OK it, it reverts back to whatever it was set to before.

What are the odds? I was researching the exact problem and this thread was on top off the search results of startpage.com. (did not mention any games in my search).
This topic is really old so surely there must be a solution now?

All I want to do is play old games (like System Shock) in 640x480 but that's impossible with either stretching or tiny squint sized 1:1 ratio. 


(On second thought its not that surprising that System Shock fans are the only ones that really suffer from this mess.)


Edit: Ok. There is the workaround solution to set windows to approx. 860x484, hide the task bar, remove the title bar, clean up the desktop and play System Shock in window mode. Worth it.

[662b5692f1cd6JDoran]

I never saw/read about a fix, after the ones I tried and listed in this thread, but TBH I gave up ages back, as my laptop is fast enough to run anything I want on it at either stetched full screen, or 1:1 pixels at 1024x768 (the 4:3 setting that older games insist upon, and also the resolution I run DOSBox at), so I stopped looking. I did intend to restore the laptop to it's factory state, so that it should have the working enlarge-screen-but-keep-the-aspect-ratio function, and then I'd try to track down which Windows update (or possibly GFX driver update, but I'm sure I've never updated the GFX driver) caused the problem. Or else I'd do it manually, instead of using the built in Hewlett Packard restore-to-factory-default function, I might have formatted the laptop, and installed the drivers, checking at every step to see when the aspect ratio feature got disabled, but in the end I never bothered, as:

a) Knowing Microsoft, it was probably a critical (hah!) update, something mandatory that you *have* to install or Windows can't be updated further,

and

b)  I couldn't be bothered, as I'm sick of stupid problems that always lead back to Windows. The laptop works fine, at least with every game I use in it, so that's that.

Sorry I don't have a better answer. Maybe Microsoft/AMD/Hewlett Packard have released a fix for it by now, but I don't know of any. I'd be surprised if any of the three had actually formally admitted that it was even a problem. But it's put me buying a HP laptop in future, every laptop I've seen this problem on has been a HP laptop, is yours?

[662b5692f1e44Ndrake]

I found some people saying that the "Maintain Aspect Ratio" Feature was removed from the driver altogether. It's the most probable explanation I could gather. That's a definite "never again AMD" for me.
I'm on an acer laptop but staying away form HP is also a good idea as I've seen a case of inexplicable overheating when HP claimed two times to have fixed it after it was sent in to support.

1024x768 is no solution for isometric games like the infinity engine ones because that makes all the GUI and fonts way too small.

[662b5692f21c0JDoran]

I found some people saying that the "Maintain Aspect Ratio" Feature was removed from the driver altogether. It's the most probable explanation I could gather.

That might well be true, but I can't for the life of me think why they would choose to remove a feature that is (a) useful, and (b) actually works. If it was something that was glitchy, then fair enough, but from what I can remember it worked very well.

And yes, it's a *huge* push for me towards nVidia, too.

[662b5692f2326IvanDolvic]

With the latest Catalyst driver the scaling options are no longer greyed out in native resolution - hower it still doesn't work. The picture still gets stretched. What's even worse: the trick to set a low resolution and change the scaling options does not work anymore. -_-

It gets back to "normal" when you connect a D-SUB cable, but I don't really want to use them anymore. Sad times for old games.

For DOS games there a really simple resolution. You just need to change in the dosbox.conf file the following lines:
fullresolution=desktop
output=overlay

[662b5692f2439JDoran]

Thanks for that, mate. What is a 'D-SUB cable', though, please?

Also, are you having this problem on a Hewlett Packard laptop (the only machines I've seen this problem on), or is it a different manufacturer, or a desktop?

[662b5692f27c1ZylonBane]

Thanks for that, mate. What is a 'D-SUB cable', though, please?

Good question!

[662b5692f291dIvanDolvic]

Oh it's an analog monitor connection cable for desktop PCs (https://www.google.de/search?q=d-sub&newwindow=1&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=_jSlVI63G-b4ywPk4IKICw&ved=0CAgQ_AUoAQ&biw=1920&bih=921) - so this won't work for laptops :-(

[662b5692f2a6eKolya]

At least not for the built-in display.

[662b5692f2b6cJDoran]

OK, thanks. But why would this connector make the games OK (i.e. fix the 1:1 pixel ratio problem), does this connection make the option appear and work, or what?

[662b5692f2d5fnilskislon]

Hallo, i had a similar problem for months (R7 260x on Win 7 64bit), and i solved it today with the DDU utility (Display Driver uninstaller, for AMD or NVIDIA). I had most, including lowest resolutions with incorrect/stretched aspect ratios. Note that i never had anything grayed out, and could set permanently the "keep aspect ratio" option in CCC to begin with (on any resolution). ATIGPUScalingFix 1.1 didn't help.

Direct link for newest DDU version: http://www.guru3d.com/files-get/display-driver-uninstaller-download,16.html

I reset to default settings (lower right corner in DDU) before starting the (AMD! ) driver removal. Be sure also to install proper monitor drivers (mine would reset to default ones after each un/install of display drivers, so do it immediately after reinstalling).

Hope this helps someone...

[662b5692f3279JDoran]

Hallo, i had a similar problem for months (R7 260x on Win 7 64bit), and i solved it today with the DDU utility (Display Driver uninstaller, for AMD or NVIDIA). I had most, including lowest resolutions with incorrect/stretched aspect ratios. Note that i never had anything grayed out, and could set permanently the "keep aspect ratio" option in CCC to begin with (on any resolution). ATIGPUScalingFix 1.1 didn't help.

Direct link for newest DDU version: http://www.guru3d.com/files-get/display-driver-uninstaller-download,16.html

I reset to default settings (lower right corner in DDU) before starting the (AMD! ) driver removal. Be sure also to install proper monitor drivers (mine would reset to default ones after each un/install of display drivers, so do it immediately after reinstalling).

Hope this helps someone...

Thanks for replying, but I don't unerstand what you're saying, sorry, and I don't have my laptop with me at the moment (I'm at work). I take it Display Driver uninstaller only removes the driver from your system), so what version of the driver did you then (after uninstalling the one that didn't work) install to get the aspect resolution settings working?

It would be great to know the last version of the drivers that did not have the aspect ration problem.

I still find it difficult to believe that this problem has never (as far as I know) been fixed in later drivers.

[662b5692f340fnilskislon]

Yes, i forgot that, i'm using the latest catalyst omega 14.12 AMD driver package. I tried 3 or 4 driver revisions from April till now, but all had this problem.

What DDU did is totally remove all settings from the computer (registry, files...), and whatever was causing the problem vanished. So i think my problem was never driver related.

After removal/reinstall, every setting is reset to default, so you have to reactivate GPU up-scaling in CCC and select maintain aspect ratio (and apply, of course). I did this while in resolution 800x600 and immediately saw the aspect ratio correction.

Let me know if you need more info.

[662b5692f372dbellator]

I have the same issue on a different game; Knights of the Old Republic 2 (found this thread when searching for solutions actually). Although I can play the game with black bars on 1280x768 with a widescreen fix (the game doesn't work correctly in 1366x768), the .bik videos aren't scaled, so they're annoyingly small (I now know new, larger cutscenes to replace the small ones have been made available, but I would still like to fix this issue). More to the point, playing the game on a smaller resolution gives me the same problem; it doesn't scale up. (currently on Catalyst 14.501.1003.0/Omega 14.12 using Mobility Radeon HD 5650). This problem only occurs in fullscreen-mode; the game/movies are scaled in windowed mode, but that is not an option on some games.

The thing is, when I noticed the problem, I checked to see if my desktop resolution would scale up. So I set it to 800x600, and no, it didn't scale (huge black bars on all sides). Not really a surprise. The scaling option was greyed out, and ATIGPUScalingFix tool did not work. Removing and re-installing the drivers didn't work. However, when using the DDU utility posted by nilskislon first, then installing the new drivers again, I was now able to scale desktop resolution!  The scaling option is no longer greyed out. I thought this would fix the issue since scaling now seems to work, but it still does not scale up the game from a lower resolution. It doesn't even stretch it, only "Use centered timings" works, the other options do not seem to have an effect on games. Only the desktop. I find this very strange. I am thinking about installing the driver that came with the laptop around 2010 to see if this is a driver issue, because I am positive I have played games on a lower resolution than x768 without a black frame around everything.

It is worth to try the DDU removal tool for others to see if they're luckier, at least it got my desktop to scale.

[662b5692f3875nilskislon]

Just to confirm that the 800x600 game Eschalon: Book I scales correctly after i used DDU (was stretched before), starting it from a 1680x1050 desktop.

Teslagrad for example does not scale correctly, but will give a proper "square" (800x600, 1024x768...) aspect ratio if started from a square desktop (i think any will do, as long as it is 4:3).

[662b5692f3a88Nintendo Maniac 64]

I'm a bit late to this discussion, but I just wanted to post my "solution" that I've been using for a while.  However, it really is only optimal for 1366x768 displays (particularly laptops).

First off, from what I can tell, "preserve aspect ratio" works perfectly fine as long as you use any resolution other than your panel's native resolution.  Therefore, you can "cheat" on 1366x768 displays by instead just setting your desktop resolution to 1360x768 which not only lets you set "preserve aspect ratio" but will even remember that setting if you switch to 1024x768 or 800x600 and back - just as long as you do not touch 1366x768.  This also means that, any programs and games where you normally would use 1366x768, you should instead use 1360x768.

If you have a display that is 1600x900 or 1920x1080, you might be able to use "Custom Resolution Utility" to make a custom resolution of 1598x900 or 1918x1080 and use that for your desktop resolution, but this is something I have never tried.

[662b5692f3fe3Nintendo Maniac 64]

just as long as you do not touch 1366x768.  This also means that, any programs and games where you normally would use 1366x768, you should instead use 1360x768.

I have an update regarding the above-quoted text; it turns out that some programs can actually switch to your monitors native resolution without screwing up the aspect ratio settings.  Most notibly is that MPC-HC is one of these programs (doesn't matter whether you use D3D fullscreen or not), but I believe most games would cause problems with said aspect ratio setting.

Another thing I forgot to mention is that a few games (such as Mass Effect 3 or Bulletstorm) don't like resolutions that aren't multiples of 8, so for a custom resolution on a 1920x1080 display it'd be better to use 1920x1072.  Alternatively, using a resolution higher than your panel's native resolution, that is doing "downsamping", may also work for avoiding your monitor's native resolution (like using 2560x1440 on a 1920x1080 display).

[662b5692f4152UJIbU4]

ATI GPU Scaling Fix for Windows 7 from 2010 is still applicable for modern gpu scaling problems, it's reuploaded with instructions here: https://community.amd.com/thread/235771

[662b5693002a4JDoran]

ATI GPU Scaling Fix for Windows 7 from 2010 is still applicable for modern gpu scaling problems, it's reuploaded with instructions here: https://community.amd.com/thread/235771

That looks like the same program I used, that did work, then didn't thanks to some mandatory Windows update or other. It might not be the same one, and I'll give it a try, but I don't think I ever updated the GFX driver because other than the scaling problem, everything else works fine (and with PCs, if it works then it's often not smart to try to fix an unimportant problem, because Microsoft), so that might be a factor for me too.

I'll give it a go and report back, thanks for suggesting it here.



, on the grounds that everything works (aside from the scaling, which I didn't need as the laptop runs verything full screen (1366 x 768) or 4:3