How to Force Steam to Launch a Game in a Specific Resolution

As a gamer who has been using an ultrawide monitor for quite a while now (aside from a break I had due to a moving error that led to the early demise of my beloved first Super Ultrawide), I have found myself in dire need of forcing some games to regular resolutions — like the ones that are incompatible with our ludicrous 3840x1080 and 5120x1440. As such, I figured if I needed Steam to launch my games at 16:9 resolutions a surprising amount of times, someone else out there would need it, too.

In this guide, I'll tell you how to force a game to launch in a specific resolution (most notably, 16:9 ones) and stop a game from launching ultrawide. These two will be used in conjunction to stop games from stretching and preventing you from reaching the video settings to set your desired resolution.

Opening Launch Options on Steam

Before we get started on how to use commands to force your desired resolution and full screen or not, we'll first need to find the Steam-integrated "Launch Settings", which is how we'll use an in-engine solution to the issues. This is implemented to allow you to choose various commands to force the launch options.

To get there, all you need to do is right-click your desired game, select "properties", and then at the bottom of the screen that opens, you'll see the Launch Options textbox. This is where you can use commands, which are the ways that we'll start games at our desired resolution and window format.

Choosing Your Desired Resolution

This is the part where it gets interesting. The official Steam Support FAQ teaches you how to use all of the launch options, suggesting that you use the -w # command rather than the one we'll display here. For the sake of being as comprehensive as possible, we're going to dictate both the Steam recommended command and the one that we use that works for us — either of these should be fine to use.

Starting with what Steam recommends over at the FAQ, you can use the -w # command, wherein the # portion of it is one of 10 options that you can choose from, each of which has a resolution it supports. You can choose between:

• 640 (640x480) GoldSource Only
• 720 (720x576)
• 800 (800x600)
• 1024 (1024x768)
• 1152 (1152x864)
• 1280 (1280x1024)
• 1600 (1600x1200)
• 1768 (1768 x 992)
• 1920 (1920 x 1080)
• 2560 (2560 x 1440)

So, a command to run a game at 1920 x 1080 would look like so:

-w 1920

From there, the Launch Options should launch your game at 1920 x 1080 resolution; you can also choose any of the other options as well. That said, it's worth noting that the 640 option might run slower than the 800 option in some of the newer cards, so bear that in mind when using this for Frames-per-second purposes.

Our command is a bit more complex, but it should let you choose both your screen width and height while also being overall more reliable. You can choose both by doing the following command:

-screen-width # -screen-height #

Of course, you should change your desired # to any of the combinations for the resolution you want, like replacing -screen-width # with 1920 and -screen-height with 1080. It would look like this:

-screen-width 1920 -screen-height 1080

Once you do either of these two, your game should launch in 1920 x 1080 (or whichever resolution you picked), but it might not launch in windowed mode. For that, you'll need to change it specifically in the Launch Options, too.

Forcing the Game to Change to Windowed Mode

Now, there is a much easier way to change your screen from fullscreen to windowed without having to mess with either the settings menu (for those whose screen is stretched so much that it hides the option) or changing your Launch Options. This, alongside the command above, should be enough to make it work without needing to change your launch options.

Integrated into Windows, all you hate to do is hit ALT+ENTER on most fullscreen titles to turn it into windowed. Though this should, theoretically, be an infallible way for you to change from fullscreen to windowed, it might not work for every title; we suggest using this first before trying out the Launch Options route, as it should be simpler and way more reliable (more on that in a second).

This is where, once again, Steam's FAQ is a bit outdated. During testing, we tried all of the five different windowed commands that Valve suggests, and only one of them successfully removed the fullscreen from our games, and even that was inconsistent. To actually run your games windowed from the start, you're going to want to do the following command: 

-windowed

However, this option is not infallible, and in fact, we found a high failure rate when trying this across many games, wherein we tried to change the fullscreen resolution to windowed via the Launch Options with no success. While some, like Ghostrunner 2, would launch in windowed resolution without a hitch, even Sony's God of War (2018) ignored the -windowed command. And even then, when tabbing into Ghostrunner 2, it would default to in-game chosen settings rather than forced Launch Options. 

It seems like it's more likely that the -windowed command launches the game in borderless windowed mode rather than windowed; for the most part, it would launch in fullscreen with our taskbar still present. Even with consistent tests across a lot of platforms, the Launch Options approach is not a reliable way to change from fullscreen to windowed.

In Conclusion

While using Launch Options is a great opportunity to get games into your desired resolution — and pretty much a necessity for any ultrawide aficionados who like indie games — it isn't a great option to use alone. To fix our ultrawide and stretching issues, we tend to launch the game and hit ALT+ENTER (as indicated above) to remove the fullscreen lock. If that alone doesn't change your resolution to 16:9 (which a lot of games default to), then you go into the Launch Options and (preferably) use the second command:

-screen-width 1920 -screen-height 1080

Once you do this, your game should change to 1920x1080 the next time you launch it, meaning you'll have a smaller window that you can then access settings with and work around. For troubleshooting and overall accessibility, we recommend launching games on 1920x1080 (though it's not the biggest 16:9 ultrawide and super ultrawide monitors run) because 2560x1440 takes up half the screen in 49-inch monitors, and the bottom may be cut off for some games that have the title bar appear, making it a bit uncomfortable to manoeuvre.

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And there you have it! A quick look at the Launch Options menu and how we reliably get it to work by fusing it with Windows-integrated commands. We hope we were helpful!