While yesterday’s Gears of War patch did include a number of good fixes and tweaks. VGA cable users should be careful choosing whether to update or not! Be warned, while the patch does fix aspect ratio distortion when using VGA cable, it severely messes up the image in terms of jagged edges, even giving a pixilated view in places. Instead of a crisp clean 720p image at 1280×1024 (16:9), VGA users are now forced to a 480p image at 640×480 (4:3).
Epic’s boss Mark Rein commented on their official Gears of War forum with: “We’ll figure out what’s going on and post something when we do.”
Xboxic explains the hatred for this patch from SDTV owners is universal: The overlapping text in the score display is not the only issue that SDTV owners have to deal with, the game is now jaggy and generally washed out. This is probably a result of the aspect ratio being reduced to 640×480. Some users have also reported a reduction in their field of view. Let’s hope Epic will fix this soon.