Does this just improve the graphics by making them sharper or does is shrink everything? I've found that 800x600 was as big as I wanted to go as anything higher made everything way too small. Even at 1024x768 and my monitor is 1920x1080.

It makes everything, especially your party, look more distant so that you can see less close-up detail on, e.g., armour and weapons. I've settled on 1280*720 (16:9 aspect ratio) for all of the IE games but I would have preferred to be a bit less "zoomed out". It's down to personal preference ultimately. I can remember many people preferring to play BG2 in 640*480 rather than 800*600 because they preferred to see more detail on weapons and armour.

I should have added that 1280*720 is, I believe, the lowest 16:9 resolution you can choose when using the widescreen mod. I'm not sure whether or not you can create a custom resolution which is smaller than this ? My machine has the customise option in the Nvidia control panel greyed out so I'm unable to experiment. Another problem with using a higher resolution is that the text can be a bit hard to read if you're a bit myopic like me. There is a "Bigger Fonts" mod (it's linked in the Sticky) which addresses this problem. So for me it comes down to choosing between playing with black borders and being able to see more close-up detail, or using the widescreen mod and observing my party from a distance.

That's what I thought. I'll stick to 800x600. Thanks.

1024x768, or maybe 1280x720 / 800 / 1024 is the highest you should go. If you go any higher, you'll get a very dark screen with a light field of view bubble around your party, which is very annoying IMHO. It already starts on the sides, on the 1280 resolutions.

Personally I've stuck to 640x480 for a long time, because I didn't like the shifting GUI when going into a journal or a store, but I got used to that now. At the moment, my preferred resolution is 800x600 on a 19 inch monitor. If I'd be using a widescreen monitor, I'd probably go to 1280x720 or 1280x800, or I might actually stick to 800x600 or 1024x768. I don't know yet; I'd need to try.

On a non-widescreen monitor, 800x600 seems the perfect resolution. For games such as these, I'd have liked that I'd had one of those old flat (25cm thick or so) Philips CRT's around, but they where WAAY to expensive at the time.