It was too obscure during the 90s, so barely anyone bothered with software compensation, especially when it comes to games. And by the time this resolution got widely adopted there were LCDs.

1280x1024 is square pixels because the monitors are 5:4, not 4:3. It depends what screen you are using as to wehther it's correct or not. On an original 5:4 monitor it will be correct. On a 4:3 screen it will be wider than it should be, you'd need to leave some black area on the left and right for it to be "correct". But as mentioned above the difference is pretty small so most people treat 4:3 and 5:4 as basically the same.

That being said, most games that support 1280x1024 will also work at 1280x960 which is the true 4:3 equivalent.

VGA monitors would display
320x200
320x240
320x400
360x240
640x200
640x350
*640x400
640x480
720x400
720x350 (T)

Back in the day the image “display area” on many older screens was rarely anywhere near the full viewable area let alone into overscan.

I noted the display area wasn’t a consistent aspect ratio regardless of the resolution varying by screen . And many older screens lacked any meaningful user adjustment.

Add to this some software lacked aspect correction screen to screen (actually a lot of CGA software didn’t attempt to target the actual aspect ratio)

I’m not gonna say nobody cared but minor distortion was just expected and usually overlooked or viewed with a haha.

It was more important to fit visual elements in your limited resolution than getting perfect aspect.

My view back in 2006 was that video content would need to be sent in a new format with different layers and elements called out similar to a website so the majority of video content could automatically rearrange/scale based on the aspect and orientation of the screen.

News has suffered greatly in 16:9 as most stations either waste the non-4:3 real estate on blank space or they cover people up having a wierd transistion to inlayed video.

Regular tv shows and even movies suffer from poor scaling and cropping de-emphasizing characters and important intended visuals due to this.

One of the few uses for AI would be to for example crop, re-arrange and resize video content for goofy cell phone screens even in vertical scraping the text banner and resizing to the bottom, cropping and enlarging the cast member(s) so they fit and hopefully treating inlaid video as its own layer above or below the crew in vertical or 4:3 aspects.

Even movies could have characters scanned in separately from the background when viewing on an ideotic aspect or orientation so everything you need to see fits.

Imagine how much better tictok would be if they just didn’t vslice some 32:9 content and put text overtop, instead allowing different viewports?

Even in 2006 this would not have been complex but it would have potentially used slightly more bandwidth to send layered content.
And as always the viewer should be able to choose their presentation as opposed to the very draconian way content is force fed today.

We knew we were gonna have this random video screen aspect issue decades ago and nobody did much across the board to address the problem until very recently.

I've heard that the reason this resolution exists is so that 1280x1024x24bpp fits nicely in 4mb of video RAM. Is that it or was there another reason for 1280x1024 to exist?

jakethompson1 wrote on 2026-09-14, 16:33:

I've heard that the reason this resolution exists is so that 1280x1024x24bpp fits nicely in 4mb of video RAM. Is that it or was there another reason for 1280x1024 to exist?

Outside 640x480 every resolution was chosen to fit evenly into standard memory of the day

CGA 640x200 fits almost exactly in 16k
HGC - 720x348 fits almost exactly into 32k

( technically PGA had exactly 320k for its 640x480-256 mode which after room for instructions is almost exact)

800x600 - 240k enough for palletized in 256k svga

1024x768 384k, 768k, 1536k, 2.25mb (all possible to fit exactly using increments banks of 256k memory chips)

1280x1024 - 320k, 640k, 1280k 2560k , 3840k
Factors of 640kb all around

1600x1200 - 234.375k per bit of color, 16 colors fits in 1mb of vram (worth noting workstation screens were typically 1600x1280 which was 250k and fit more neatly into memory)

These resolutions were “standard” being in high end workstations/servers/minis since the late 70’s / early 80’s.

Being used on non-pc they really would install exactly and only enough ram to drive the screen as ram density was lower and monochrome was common. PC makers just copied their work as prices came down.

One famous “megapixel resolution “ was 1024x1024 which specifically fit in 128kb of ram, its lack of aspect ratio kept it Sun specific

It's a complicate question, with really no definite answer.

CRT were physically 4/3 no matter the resolution, and hardly even most nitpicker people preferred to calibrate the monitor trading black bars for aspect ratio correctness. Perhaps few people realized that 1280/1024 wasn't 1.33.

Then LCD came and they were psychically 5/4 so any SW that took in account the CRT (slightly) distorted aspect ratio, ended being distorted in the opposite direction on LCD.

In short the only reasonable answer is "it depends". It depends on personal preference/sensibility and it depends on the logic of each SW taken in account.

Perhaps even some early games that mixed 3D with 2D elements may have 3D adapted correctly but 2D elements distorted or viceversa

The Solutor wrote on 2026-09-14, 19:11:

It's a complicate question, with really no definite answer.

CRT were physically 4/3 no matter the resolution, and hardly even most nitpicker people preferred to calibrate the monitor trading black bars for aspect ratio correctness. Perhaps few people realized that 1280/1024 wasn't 1.33.

No CRTs were not universally 4:3, even back in the olde mainframe days many screens were perfectly circuline and the driver used the whole circle for display and tracing purposes.

Circuline screens (perfectly round) made their way into TVs and generally part of the image was cropped off by the blacking.

Later on CRT monitors did not use the full viewable area and lacked useful user adjustments , similarly supposed home computers you plugged in the tv also didn’t use the full viewable area.
On these systems the aspect for the usuable area (no overscan) was many times not 4:3 even if the tube was.

Part of the reason for this was the very curvy 4:3 displays many times distorted the image too much to the far left and rh sides giving you closer to a 1:1 usuable aspect .

This is just reality and why your experience on a vintage machine could be different depending on what type of display device you used.

If you adjusted a CRT to exactly fill the visible area on one resolution, it would usually be shifted to one side or cut off on a different resolution. Later microprocessor controlled CRTs were better about this because they could remember sync settings for multiple resolutions but most people ended up living with some amount of underscan anyway.

The 1280 x 1024 resolution dates back before VESA standards and was used on the Sony NeWS workstations. In the advertising brochure for those from 1988, you see larger black bars on the left and right side of the monitor in most screenshots. Someone could try to calculate the exact displayed aspect ratio of those screenshots by comparing the dimensions of xeyes if they wanted to.

The Solutor wrote on 2026-09-14, 19:11:

Then LCD came and they were psychically 5/4 so any SW that took in account the CRT (slightly) distorted aspect ratio, ended being distorted in the opposite direction on LCD.

Isn't this nothing inherent about LCDs, just that 1280x1024 was the canonical desktop LCD resolution for a time? There were plenty of 4:3 LCDs before that--consider any 1990s laptop.

onethirdxcubed wrote on 2026-09-14, 23:26:

Someone could try to calculate the exact displayed aspect ratio of those screenshots by comparing the dimensions of xeyes if they wanted to.

I calculated the aspect of the image area on the monitor to ~1.246 which is almost exactly 5:4 (1.25)

When I 1280x1024'd in 2000 I rolled with it being squashed to 4:3 as it had a funny detailed look (and gave me more vertical viewing space in the FOV). The pixels were NOT square - that would be 1280x960 which wasn't as widely supported by games then - it'd be 1152x864 vs 1280x1024 at the highest (1600x1200 if you're lucky)

rmay635703 wrote on 2026-09-14, 20:50:

No CRTs were not universally 4:3, even back in the olde mainframe days many screens were perfectly circuline and the driver used the whole circle for display and tracing purposes.

So, captain obvious, you discovered that circular tubes didn't have fractional aspect ratio?

Obviously I was talking of most, if not all, consumer CRTs of the era. Then there were few specialized ones, even with 1:1 aspect ratio, used for specialized applications (radar, military, and so on) but they are out of the scope of the of the OP question.

Circuline screens (perfectly round) made their way into TVs and generally part of the image was cropped off by the blacking.

Those were mainly a US thing, from the stone age era of TV, here TV arrived in 1954, and at that round CRTs were already extinct.

Later on CRT monitors did not use the full viewable area and lacked useful user adjustments , similarly supposed home computers you plugged in the tv also didn’t use the full viewable area.
On these systems the aspect for the usuable area (no overscan) was many times not 4:3 even if the tube was.

Even many TVs from 1960/70/80 had adjustment of horizontal and vertical amplitude, maybe on the back panel but they had it, let alone monitors. Which come handy when you had to deal with some odd devices like the Sinclair QL that had the infamous 512x256 HI RES mode, that didn't fit horizontally in properly calibrated TVs (properly calibrated to watch TV, I mean)

Maybe some monitor for dedicated/fixed frequency application lacked them, as a user accessible controls (say terminals and alike) but I have yet to see a consumer monitor from the 90s that wasn't adjustable by the user.

jakethompson1 wrote on 2026-09-15, 00:01:

Isn't this nothing inherent about LCDs, just that 1280x1024 was the canonical desktop LCD resolution for a time? There were plenty of 4:3 LCDs before that--consider any 1990s laptop.

By the time the average PC was able to go UP to that resolution, the first LCD were arriving, given the early LCD monitors were expensive, their market penetration varied depending the richness of the country taken in account.

So that's another question where "it depends" is the only reasonable short answer.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2026-09-14, 12:28:

It was too obscure during the 90s, so barely anyone bothered with software compensation, especially when it comes to games. And by the time this resolution got widely adopted there were LCDs.

NeoG_ wrote on 2026-09-14, 13:02:

1280x1024 is square pixels because the monitors are 5:4, not 4:3. It depends what screen you are using as to wehther it's correct or not. On an original 5:4 monitor it will be correct. On a 4:3 screen it will be wider than it should be, you'd need to leave some black area on the left and right for it to be "correct". But as mentioned above the difference is pretty small so most people treat 4:3 and 5:4 as basically the same.

That being said, most games that support 1280x1024 will also work at 1280x960 which is the true 4:3 equivalent.

The Solutor wrote on 2026-09-14, 19:11:

It's a complicate question, with really no definite answer. […]
Show full quote

It's a complicate question, with really no definite answer.

CRT were physically 4/3 no matter the resolution, and hardly even most nitpicker people preferred to calibrate the monitor trading black bars for aspect ratio correctness. Perhaps few people realized that 1280/1024 wasn't 1.33.

Then LCD came and they were psychically 5/4 so any SW that took in account the CRT (slightly) distorted aspect ratio, ended being distorted in the opposite direction on LCD.

In short the only reasonable answer is "it depends". It depends on personal preference/sensibility and it depends on the logic of each SW taken in account.

Perhaps even some early games that mixed 3D with 2D elements may have 3D adapted correctly but 2D elements distorted or viceversa

leileilol wrote on 2026-09-15, 01:32:

When I 1280x1024'd in 2000 I rolled with it being squashed to 4:3 as it had a funny detailed look (and gave me more vertical viewing space in the FOV). The pixels were NOT square - that would be 1280x960 which wasn't as widely supported by games then - it'd be 1152x864 vs 1280x1024 at the highest (1600x1200 if you're lucky)

1. So when people played Doom (or similar) in say ~1993, they didn't adjust their screens to fill the image into 4:3?

2. Wasn't this also how SNES worked, you had to strech it to fill your TV screen?

3. I'm asking because I've LG Flatron F900P and Samsung SyncMaster 900IFT (both are CRTs) and they both (in OSD and manual) recommend 1280 x 1024@ 85Hz, which is 5:4, so if I run games in that resolution should I stretch to 4:3 or not?
I'm talking for games that were after Doom that could use multiple resolutions, so if I pick 1280x1024, do I live with black bars, or do I stretch it?

4. Except for the whole "it fit the video RAM size", why would these two monitors recommend a 5:4 resolution?

2mg wrote on 2026-09-15, 03:24:

1. So when people played Doom (or similar) in say ~1993, they didn't adjust their screens to fill the image into 4:3?

When people played Doom (as current), most machine were at 800x600 (or 1024x768 for people with deeper pockets), and most monitors were either 12/14, then 15 inches.

By the time the average VGA had enough RAM/Horsepower to go up to to 1280x1024 and 17/19" were affordable, Doom was already considered archaeology.

3. I'm asking because I've LG Flatron F900P and Samsung SyncMaster 900IFT (both are CRTs) and they both (in OSD and manual) recommend 1280 x 1024@ 85Hz, which is 16:10, so if I run games in that resolution should I stretch to 4:3 or not?

Are you sure you understood what aspect ratio means?

16:10= 1.6

1280:1024=1.25

Your monitor is physically 4:3 =1.33 no matter the resolution displayed.

So if you want to use a 16:10 resolution on it, and keep the tight proportion you need to have enough black bars on top and bottom of the image.

Just open paint design a circle and squish the image until that circle is round, not exactly rocket science... 😀

The Solutor wrote on 2026-09-15, 03:08:

So, captain obvious, you discovered that circular tubes didn't have fractional aspect ratio? […]
Show full quote

rmay635703 wrote on 2026-09-14, 20:50:

No CRTs were not universally 4:3, even back in the olde mainframe days many screens were perfectly circuline and the driver used the whole circle for display and tracing purposes.

So, captain obvious, you discovered that circular tubes didn't have fractional aspect ratio?

Obviously I was talking of most, if not all, consumer CRTs of the era. Then there were few specialized ones, even with 1:1 aspect ratio, used for specialized applications (radar, military, and so on) but they are out of the scope of the of the OP question.

Circuline screens (perfectly round) made their way into TVs and generally part of the image was cropped off by the blacking.

Those were mainly a US thing, from the stone age era of TV, here TV arrived in 1954, and at that round CRTs were already extinct.

Later on CRT monitors did not use the full viewable area and lacked useful user adjustments , similarly supposed home computers you plugged in the tv also didn’t use the full viewable area.
On these systems the aspect for the usuable area (no overscan) was many times not 4:3 even if the tube was.

Even many TVs from 1960/70/80 had adjustment of horizontal and vertical amplitude, maybe on the back panel but they had it, let alone monitors. Which come handy when you had to deal with some odd devices like the Sinclair QL that had the infamous 512x256 HI RES mode, that didn't fit horizontally in properly calibrated TVs (properly calibrated to watch TV, I mean)

Maybe some monitor for dedicated/fixed frequency application lacked them, as a user accessible controls (say terminals and alike) but I have yet to see a consumer monitor from the 90s that wasn't adjustable by the user.

My point went over your head, if you were to measure the image on screen ignoring the tube you would find things like this 5151 MDA monitor

Notice the image is roughly 4 : 2.5 ratio (8:5)
And some MDA tubes from other brands which are nothing special did actually sell with a dimensionally different tube that had a non 4:3 viewable area.

MDA was very much not intended to be user adjustable

Even My Tandy VGM-225 a 1992 VGA color monitor much like the MDA screen did not have a 4:3 image on its tube (as a boy I measured it, yes I was strange)
and you needed a very small screwdriver to slightly adjust its image size/position. Even at full crank you couldn’t fill the monitor edge to edge with the image, not enough trim.

Based on this I would say both manufacturers and consumers didn’t much care about the aspect ratio , unless you owned a Sun or a Mac, you got close enough.

My first svga monitor a beat up 15” MAG Claimed to support up to 1280x1024, taking a guess it probably did not have a 5:4 tube.

My school had early Strange ncr 286 systems with a proprietary “super CGA “ card and screen.

The image looked great on color text but the image again was squattier and wider than 4:3.

Until we got to the lcd age as a previous commenter said, it depends is the only answer.
Consistently inconsistent

2mg wrote on 2026-09-15, 03:24:

1. So when people played Doom (or similar) in say ~1993, they didn't adjust their screens to fill the image into 4:3?

Nope. the 70hz refresh would provide that stretch up. Seeing DOS Doom in 1993 on 16:10 usually meant you had a laptop.

The Solutor wrote on 2026-09-15, 03:48:

When people played Doom (as current), most machine were at 800x600 (or 1024x768 for people with deeper pockets), and most monitors were either 12/14, then 15 inches.

640x480-max VGA monitors were still *VERY* common in 1993-94, and they didn't always present adjustment knobs beyond brightness either. By '95 there were affordable 800/1024x768 monitors, many being trinitron-likes (including some obscure manufacturers who only briefly did business in the US for a few years)

rmay635703 wrote on 2026-09-15, 03:51:

My point went over your head, if you were to measure the image on screen ignoring the tube you would find things like this 5151 MDA monitor

The majority of CRT tubes were 4/3. Period. And remained so until the first 15:9 (aka 5:3) ones arrived for the MUSE analogue HDTV , then 16:9 ones arrived because even Japanese agreed to that ratio.

Everything else is matter of calibration, and personal preferences. (some people preferred to have a filled screen ad the price of a distorted image, some other preferred to have the correct aspect ratio at the price of some black bars (or some crop).

Some makers preferred to cover part of the screen edge to make the monitor/TV to look more modern.

It's matter of trends... cars from 1960 were all curved, cars from 1970 were all angled and so on... the same did apply to screens, old american TVs often had a circular CRT that was masked on top and bottom but not on the sides, and looked like a barrel, then technology evolved slowly but steadily until the last days of CRTs with LG Flatrons and equivalent Samsung and Sony screens.

During that long process various aesthetic solutions were tried to make a screen more angled, but still the mask applied to them hardly diverged much from the 4:3 ratio. For obvious reasons.

Notice the image is roughly 4 : 2.5 ratio (8:5)

Call it 16:10 more easy to understand these days

And some MDA tubes from other brands which are nothing special did actually sell with a dimensionally different tube that had a non 4:3 viewable area.

I'm curious to see a PDF of such supposed non 4/3 tubes

taking a guess it probably did not have a 5:4 tube.

In a world where we had to swallow the shitty 16:9 ratio for a decade, just because the economies of scale do you really think that someone started to make 5/4 tubes just because, someone in the silicon valley decided that 1280x1024 was a standard resolution?
On LCDs was obviously different given they had to exactly match the physical pixels with the logical ones Also that res was used in larger panels that didn't exist before, so if you start to produce something from scratch, is better if you use the correct dimensions.

leileilol wrote on 2026-09-15, 04:28:

640x480-max VGA monitors were still *VERY* common in 1993-94, and they didn't always present adjustment knobs beyond brightness either.

Sure, common. Which is different from current. And that's again varied by countries.

In the richer countries people got PCs earlier, then maybe upgraded the PC alone, keeping the old monitor, that possibly was made for text only work on offices rather than being a proper consumer product.