Need some help with my monitor (resolutions)

[El Diablo]

I've had a 1680x1050 monitor since I bought my PC and it has always treated me well and given me no problems, but the only thing that bothered me about it was that it wasn't full 1080p and I never wanted to spend the money to upgrade it because this one was so good.

Due to TV complications at one of my friends houses, it led me to looking into using my monitor as a display for my ps3 despite it not having hdmi. I had tried an hdmi > dvi adapter on my friends monitor but it did nothing so I didn't have hopes for it.

Surprisingly it actually worked, but more to my surprise, the ps3 automatically set the resolution to full 1080p and had support for all resolutions. Is this some sort of downscaling it does to display at 1080p but make it fit in the screen?

My real question is if my ps3 is capable of doing this, is there any possible way to "force" 1080p on my PC? I can't help but think that if the ps3 is able to do it, then there has to be some sort of hack or work around or custom drivers or something to make it possible on a PC?

 

[FrozenIpaq]

I've had a 1680x1050 monitor since I bought my PC and it has always treated me well and given me no problems, but the only thing that bothered me about it was that it wasn't full 1080p and I never wanted to spend the money to upgrade it because this one was so good.

Due to TV complications at one of my friends houses, it led me to looking into using my monitor as a display for my ps3 despite it not having hdmi. I had tried an hdmi > dvi adapter on my friends monitor but it did nothing so I didn't have hopes for it.

Surprisingly it actually worked, but more to my surprise, the ps3 automatically set the resolution to full 1080p and had support for all resolutions. Is this some sort of downscaling it does to display at 1080p but make it fit in the screen?

My real question is if my ps3 is capable of doing this, is there any possible way to "force" 1080p on my PC? I can't help but think that if the ps3 is able to do it, then there has to be some sort of hack or work around or custom drivers or something to make it possible on a PC?

I think the PS3 is just reading it wrong but still providing a close-to-native resolution of 1680x1050 on your monitor. It is impossible to get more pixels out of a moniitor - the PS3 is just doing something wrong / reading it wrong. It is not displaying 1080p on your monitor, it just says it is basically.

 

[x3sphere]

There are ways to do this through driver hacks, though why exactly do you want to do it? Rendering at a higher resolution would be pointless for desktop use, it'd blur the fonts due to downsampling. Like Ipaq said you cannot get more pixels, anything outside of your native res has to be scaled down to compensate.

Your PS3 is most likely rendering at native res, not 1080p, even though it shows that.

The only reason I can think of is to force a higher res in a game or something, so you can get anti-aliasing in games that don't support it. Downsampling of the higher res to native would create the same effect as SSAA.