The craze for high resolution displays is increasing each day. This is 2017 and people are ready to bid adieu to 1080p monitors and make the transition to QHD and 4K displays. However, if you’re waiting for the prices of these displays to come down, you’ll still be hanging on to your good old Full HD panels for quite some time. Nevertheless, you might still want to experience how it feels like to own a higher resolution screen, right? Also, some other people might want to lower the resolution of their screen, so that the games will perform better. Well, you can custom resolutions for your display panel. So, without further ado, let’s take a look at how to create custom resolutions on Windows 10:
Things You Will Need
Depending on the graphics card you’re utilizing, there are a couple of equally good software to choose from in order to add custom resolutions to your monitor:
- NVIDIA Control Panel is a software that comes by default after you’ve installed an NVIDIA graphics driver directly from the NVIDIA’s official website. This only works on machines with NVIDIA graphics cards.
- Custom Resolution Utility software can be installed on any machine regardless of the GPU you’re having, but it’s mostly preferred by users with AMD/Intel GPUs. You can download the software from here.
Note: I will not be held responsible for any damage that you may cause to your monitor or system during this process. So, proceed this guide with utmost caution.
Create Custom Resolutions Using NVIDIA Control Panel
Users with NVIDIA GPUs can open the control panel by a simple right-click on the desktop -> NVIDIA Control Panel to open the software. Once opened, create your custom resolution by following the steps below:
- Click on “Change Resolution“ in the Display menu in NVIDIA Control Panel. Then, scroll down and click on “Customize“. Now, a menu will pop-up on the screen.
- Check the box which says “Enable resolutions not exposed by the display” and click on “Create Custom Resolution“.
- Now type in your desired resolution in Horizontal Pixels and Desired Lines. If you’re aiming to create a custom QHD resolution (2560 x 1440), type 2560 in Horizontal Pixels and 1440 in Desired Lines, or if you’re aiming for 4K resolution, type 3840 in Horizontal Pixels and 2160 in Desired Lines. You can also choose a lower resolution than the native resolution of your display, if you desire.
- Click “Test“ to check if the resolution change is working. If it does not work, you should be able to revert back to your previous resolution.
You can choose any other resolution as well, but just make sure the aspect ratio is same as the one of your monitor, which is normally 16:9, unless you’re having an ultra-wide display. Otherwise, the icons and other texts might start to look stretched out.
Set Custom Resolutions Using Custom Resolution Utility
The process to create custom resolutions with Custom Resolution Utility is quite similar to the NVIDIA Control Panel method. So, once you’ve downloaded and installed Custom Resolution Utility, you can simply follow the steps below to set it up:
- Open the CRU.exe file from the installation directory to launch Custom Resolution Utility. Then, click on “Add” in the Detailed Resolutions menu.
- A menu will pop-up where you can type in your Horizontal Pixels and Vertical Lines in the boxes right next to the “Active“ option. Do not make any other changes in the Parameters section. Now click OK to exit the pop-up menu and press OK again to close the software.
- Once done, Restart your PC.
Once restarted, go to Display Settings -> Advanced Display Settings and check the available resolutions. If the resolution you selected on the software shows up in the dropdown menu, click it and press “Apply“ to change your monitor’s resolution. Well, that’s pretty much it. Your display will now be scaling to the custom resolution that you just set.
How Do Custom Resolutions Work?
Make no mistake, you’re definitely not going to see 4K quality on a 1080p display, because that’s a hardware limitation and you just cannot increase the pixel count on your monitor with software. Setting a custom screen resolution basically scales the display according to the resolution you’ve created, to give you more screen real-estate for viewing your content, something which you normally see on higher resolution displays.
SEE ALSO: How to Mirror Windows Screen to Android, iOS & Mac
Choose The Custom Resolution You Need
Well, as you can see, the process was far from hard. With these software, you can choose any resolution that you possibly need. So, are you ready to try this out and scale the screen resolution according to your personal needs instead of being restricted to the default resolution set by the manufacturer? If so, let us know how the process went, by simply dropping a few words in the comments section below.
