The initial NVIDIA display drivers for Windows Vista did not offer options on how to deal with non-native resolutions. If you or a program on your computer--likely a game--set the resolution to something other than your monitor's native resolution, its picture would be stretched to full-screen. And if that non-native resolution's aspect ratio was not the same as your monitor's aspect ratio, you would get a distorted (read: ugly) picture.
NVIDIA released updated Windows Vista drivers toward the end of February that added options to customize how non-native resolutions were displayed. The problem was, they didn't do anything. No matter which option you chose in the NVIDIA Control Panel, non-native resolutions still stretched to full-screen.
"The next release will fix this, right?," I wrote shortly after installing those updated drivers.
The next release is here, and it fixes this.
Sometimes.
Non-native resolutions 1024x768 and higher display the way they are told to display, but lower resolutions stretch to full-screen or, worse (and new to this version of the NVIDIA display drivers), are neither full-screen nor in their correct aspect ratios.
This feature is useless to me until it starts working properly at those lower resolutions. I used it on my previous (Windows XP) computer so games with fixed resolutions (read: 640x480) would not look terrible on my higher-resolution; wider, taller aspect ratio monitor. Now those games look terrible, so I don't play them.
This is not entirely about long-discontinued games not intended to run on contemporary computers. The Longest Journey (2000) got an official patch to make it Windows Vista-compatible, and Syberia II (2004) and the Sierra ****c adventure compilations (2006) are Windows Vista-compatible out-of-the-box and are intended to be viewed only at 640x480 pixels, so until it is possible to play these games on monitors that are not 640x480 pixels at 640x480 pixels or scaled but preserving their proper aspect ratio, there is no point in playing them.
If NVIDIA does not fix this soon, my next video card will be from ATI.