I have always used either NVidia Geforce or the ATI Radeon graphics cards for playing games until the day I bought a computer with Intel HD Graphics. With the NVidia and ATI graphics cards, there is absolutely no need to configure anything – you can install the graphics cards, install the drivers and start playing your games. But with Intel HD Graphics the default settings cause a problem when you try to play the games in the full screen – the games do not use the entire screen and appear as if you have an older 4:3 screen.
If you want to play games in widescreen mode so that they take up the entire screen, then you have to configure the Intel HD Graphics settings first. Here is how:
- Click on the Intel HD Graphics icon in the notification area and then choose Graphics Properties.
- In the Intel HD Graphics Control Panel, choose Display from the list of all the options.
- Choose General Settings from the left side list. Make sure that you have selected the proper screen (if you have more than one screen connected to your PC), the screen resolution and the refresh rate.
- Under the Scaling section, choose Scale full screen, and Override Application Settings.
- Click on the Apply button and you are done.
Now you can launch your favorite games and they will all run in the full screen, wide screen mode. They might appear a little bit stretched perhaps because they do not support a wide-screen resolution in the first place. But in any case, you will have a full-screen PC gaming experience and not the annoying 4:3 boxed screen gaming. If this setting causes problem with other programs, then you can can always revert back to the default settings using the Intel HD Graphics control panel as explained above.