Games don't chop off the top and bottom of picture to get a 21x9 image they add to it on the left and right. Your 21x9 image on an ultrawide is not the same as a 21x9 slice of an image on a 4k 16x9 screen.
Assume the top is a 4K image
This is what happens with the same image on a 3440x1440
This is not what happens
Another comparison
This is the same regardless of if you are comparing a 100" 4k screen to a 21" ultrawide or 2 of the same size. Resolution and screen size are irrelevant only the aspect ratio matters.
Games don't chop off the top and bottom of picture to get a 21x9 image they add to it on the left and right. Your 21x9 image on an ultrawide is not the same as a 21x9 slice of an image on a 4k 16x9 screen.
Assume the top is a 4K image
This is what happens with the same image on a 3440x1440
This is not what happens
Another comparison
This is the same regardless of if you are comparing a 100" 4k screen to a 21" ultrawide or 2 of the same size. Resolution and screen size are irrelevant only the aspect ratio matters. You could theoretically letterbox a 3440x1440 image on a 4K screen but that's just nasty and then you run into a host of potential display scaling issues.
What? I read many games support it and many can be fixed to support it. Heck even various old games from the 2000s support it.
What I have found is that height is the limiting factor for how close I can comfortably sit to any display, whether that's 4:3, 5:4, 16:9, 16:10, 21:9, or 24:10 - no matter what size it is.
You're not wrong, and I've argued this point in the past, mocking up a comparison between a 34" ultrawide display and a 55" HDTV.
While true, they are fixes for stretched HUDs/UIs and cutscenes as well. Although TVs going 21:9 would be pretty cool.
By 2020 hopefully. Even by then we hope for high settings at 60fps to be more common and more affordable.
Many games from the 00s didn't even properly support 16:9, not to mention 21:9, and for most of them don't have any fixes for that, at all. And you would be surprised how many modern non-mainstream games have fixed resolutions and don't support ultrawide either, so I'll just continue to pretend that ultrawide doesn't exist until it becomes mainstream, which is probably never.
English is not my native language so I'm sorry if it was not obvious that the first sentence was a sarcasm, of course I don't think that those people who can waste their money on ultrawide monitors are zealots or something. And I'm not making up shit, I'm just saying that ultrawide is objectively shit, I'm not trying to insult anyone, and you are free to not agree with my opinion of course.
What I have found is that height is the limiting factor for how close I can comfortably sit to any display, whether that's 4:3, 5:4, 16:9, 16:10, 21:9, or 24:10 - no matter what size it is.
It doesn't matter if it's a small monitor or a projector, I always tend to sit so that the vertical image fills about the same amount of my view - which is rather close because I like things to be immersive.
I also find that 74° vertical FoV in games is about right for that.
At that distance, ultrawide displays fill a lot more of my vision horizontally than 16:9 displays do - extending out into my peripheral vision.
My preferred 74° VFoV translates to 122° HFoV on my ultrawide monitor. If you were to use 122° on a 16:9 display it would look fisheyed.
Another advantage of an ultrawide display is that it keeps a fixed vertical size for virtually all content.
When you display movies on a 16:9 display, the image is letterboxed and gets smaller - so you have to sit closer to the screen.
When you display movies on an ultrawide display the image gets wider rather than smaller - so the viewing distance does not change.
I find pillarboxing easy to ignore, while letterboxing is distracting.
That doesn't make it any less disappointing when a game doesn't support anything wider than 16:9 though, or if it forces the UI out to the edges of the display in a game that requires a lot of interaction with it (strategy games etc).
You're not wrong, and I've argued this point in the past, mocking up a comparison between a 34" ultrawide display and a 55" HDTV.
But as I said above - the limiting factor for how close I can comfortably sit to a display is height, and at that height I need ~74° VFoV.
With those two parameters essentially being fixed, the only thing that can change is the image width.
As a result, I find my 34" ultrawide monitor more immersive than a 46" 16:9 HDTV.
Despite the HDTV being a larger display, the ultrawide monitor fills more of my vision when I am sitting at a comfortable distance from both.
Even if that were the case, many of those games in the 2000s have fixes to do 16:9, pcgamingwiki is the perfect site to find which games supported 16:9 natively and many that have fixes to support it. 21:9 isn't as common for older games, but I'm surprised that some games from that era actually have support for it(some natively and with fixes).
If you take an ultrawide FOV and put it in a 16x9 image you'll start getting effects like this (this is 160 FOV which is extreme and beyond even what you get normally on an ultrawide but illustrates the point). The number of pixels is not the limiting factor and the aspect ratio has a direct effect on how the information is displayed as the FOV is tied to it. Please refer to my previous pictures showing how the FOV is widened for ultrawide.
It's not a VR headset - you don't typically match display FoV to real-world FoV.
