widescreen vs. 19" LCD

[specs]

Hello, trying to come to a decision on a new LCD monitor....21" widescreen(Samsung 215 TW) or regular 19" (Samsung 940B), and I have a question that may simplify the choice for me! I understand that an LCD monitor is best used at it's native resolution....so with the higher resolution of the widescreen, does that mean that it will tax my computer more than the 1280x1024 of the 940B? During games, for instance, would I not be able to turn up the settings quite as much on the widescreen. Could I run the widescreen at a lower res.(same ratio), to gain a bit of performance in the game? What are the downfalls of running an LCD at something other than it's native resolution? Thanks in advance for any responses!
Al

[flanzig1]

The determining factor is, can your video card provide the resolution for the wide screen? LCD monitors aren't as forgiving at resolution charges as CRTs are, some, like the one I have has a hard time syncing up with non-native resolutions(like during boot-up).

[Dustmann]

If you wish to run native resolution on that big of a monitor, which is probably 1680x1050, it will tax more on your graphics card as you mentioned. I very rarely run games on the native 1680x1050 on my monitor, simply because my fx5200 cant handle it! Games look better at that resolution, but there is nothing stopping you from running lower resolutions. It will simply resize the pixels to display across the monitor. This creates more jaggies I think, and it will make things look kind of distorted. It will stretch everything wider to fit the screen, unless you change the settings to display black bars on 4:3 resolutions. Lower widescreen resolutions look the same as native to me, so I would say go WS and dont look back! I love mine