Why does 1080p through a VGA cable fit the HDTV but is oversized when through an HDMI cable

dvihdmiresolution

I have put together a new PC with a XFX GeForce GTX 260 graphics card and have it connected to my HDTV.

First, I used an old VGA cable with a DVI to VGA adapter and plugged it in to my HDTV's VGA port. Running at 1920×1080 it fit the screen perfectly.

Now, to avoid running another cable across the room, I have connected it with a DVI to HDMI cable to my TV's HDMI port, and the desktop at 1920×1080 is cropped by the edge of the screen.

I have "fixed" the cropping by using NVIDIA's "Adjust desktop size and position" tool, which created a screen resolution of 1814×1022 to fit the screen, but this is no longer the TV's native resolution and confuses some software (e.g. WoW).

Why does VGA work as expected, but HDMI is scaled up? Can it be avoided?

Best Answer

What you're seeing is called overscan. TVs have it as broadcasts in NTSC format sometimes did not fill the entire space on the screen. You'll need to look through your menus for a setting to adjust the overscan amount to 0%. You may even have to find a way to get into your TV's service menu to make this adjustment.

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