I'm guessing because it allows you to set the Field-of-Vision to be pretty wide?
I mostly play simulation games, particularly flying, and having a wider FoV makes things easier, until you're ready to go to the top step of using VR instead so you also get depth perception and essentially 360 FoV since you can rotate your head.
I wonder what the math would look like to properly render 3D scenes onto a curved display. Could it be accelerated as well as the regular matrix operations used for perspective projection onto planar screens?
During the pandemic I did try out my 4K TV as a game monitor. I had a combination of furniture so that I could sit rather close with my eyes approximately half way up the screen, with a keyboard and mouse in a reasonable position. Then, using an older FPS game I got it to where my laptop GPU could hit good frame rates and I adjusted the game's viewing angle to match how the screen fit my field of view.
It was deeply immersive in spite of me being so close I could "see the pixels". The only time I've felt more immersive was demoing Quake in a 3 wall + floor CAVE at a national lab decades ago.
> I wonder what the math would look like to properly render 3D scenes onto a curved display. Could it be accelerated as well as the regular matrix operations used for perspective projection onto planar screens?
The math is pretty simple to account for a curved viewport, even though I don't think any apps actually care about that. Most displays aren't curved enough to make it a meaningful difference.
We don't have fixed function pipelines anymore either so that could definitely be handled by hardware.
This used to be much more true, but almost all PC games support 21:9 now and 32:9 support pretty common too. "most games" screwed up is an exaggeration IMO. Even on games that don't officially scale, on PC they almost always have customizable FoV that gets the perspective correct again. Many modern games are even smart enough to rearrange the UI so that the critical info (health bars, ammo counts etc) is in the center of the display and not attached to the edges.
PC games have kinda been forced to support ultrawides whether they like it or not - the 21:9 class especially has exploded in popularity for gaming PCs.
I've gamed in 32:9 for years now - I wouldn't go back. The curve is not exaggerated enough to be a meaningful projection issue on most curved displays and games.
It's the curve that messes things up. It's just significantly more incorrect on wider displays. Many monitors are 1800R, and that's easily curved enough for the projection error to be quite pronounced at 32:9 using a planar projection.
I mostly play simulation games, particularly flying, and having a wider FoV makes things easier, until you're ready to go to the top step of using VR instead so you also get depth perception and essentially 360 FoV since you can rotate your head.