How to Fix Black Bars or Scaling Problems in Nvidia Graphics Cards

Tested with nvidia driver version 378.49, windows 7 64 bit, on a 1920*1200 resolution monitor on a DVI connection without geforce experience installed. Tested and works on a display port also connected to a monitor to vga through a display port to vga adapter. This should also work through an hdmi port and with geforce experience installed as well though. Tested only when using one monitor to play games on a dual monitor setup. May or may not work when using multiple monitors to play games, or with Windows 8, 8.1, or 10. Do this at your own risk; different games may work differently. Your results may vary.

Pros: faster framerates with lower resolutions, fairly straightforward process, and run games fullscreen.
Cons: not native monitor support, can be finicky to set up, and may or may not work for certain games.

1. On Nvidia control panel, in the "Display" section, where it says "Adjust desktop size and position", for scaling, set to "Full-screen". The setting "Perform scaling on" should be set to "Display", and "Override the scaling mode set by games and programs" can be unchecked. If using a dvi connected monitor, also click on the "Size" tab, and ensure that "Enable desktop resizing" is checked, and when you click on "Resize...", the 4 green arrows point to your full desktop size on the one monitor.

2. Go here and click on exe to download the res-o-matic program to automatically change the screen resolution for different programs that you run.

3. Use reso to make a shortcut of 1920*1080 for the game with black bars on the desktop instead of 1920*1200 if 1920*1200 is your monitor's native resolution (yes, unfortunately, you can't use your monitor's native resolution).

4. Start the game. Make sure that beforehand the resolution in game is set to 1920*1080 and the aspect ratio is at 16:9.

5. If your cursor doesn't lock to one monitor in game (if using dual monitors or something), download only this version of dual monitor tools here.

6. After you're done that, extract the zip file with win-rar, 7-zip, or some other program, right click on properties for swapscreen.exe and click on the Compatibility tab. Select "Run this program as an administrator" and then click "Apply" and "OK". Right click on the swapscreen program icon on your taskbar, select "Options", select the "Cursor" tab at the top, go down to "Lock Cursor onto screen" and click "Change", select a key combination that you like (such as Shift-Tab), uncheck the "Allow cursor to move freely if this key is pressed" box, and then click "Close".

7. Use your key combination to lock the screen to one monitor, and then start your game using the reso shortcut. It should work okay. Also, please note that you can startup swapscreen.exe when windows starts up by clicking on the "General" tab in the program, and putting a check in the box for "Start when Windows starts".

It would be nice if Nvidia would fix this problem and the Audiosurf AA problem, but right now, hopefully these kinds of solutions will help as a workaround.