FOV Calculator — Field of View for Monitors, Sim Racing and TVs

Find the correct field of view for your screen

The right field of view (FOV) is the angle your screen actually fills in front of your eyes. Set a game’s FOV to match it and objects appear at their real size and distance — which is why sim racers care so much about it. This FOV calculator works out that angle from your screen size, aspect ratio and viewing distance.

It handles a single flat or curved monitor, a TV across the room, and triple-screen sim racing rigs with bezels, telling you the per-screen and total FOV and how far to angle the side screens. A converter turns horizontal FOV into vertical FOV and back for any aspect ratio, since games disagree on which one their slider uses.

How to use the FOV calculator

1. Choose One screen or Triple screens.
2. Enter the diagonal size in inches and pick the aspect ratio (or type your own).
3. Measure from your eyes to the centre of the screen and enter it in centimetres or inches.
4. For a curved monitor, choose its radius (1800R means an 1800 mm radius). For triples, enter the bezel width.
5. Read the horizontal and vertical FOV, check which one your game asks for, and type it in. Use the converter if it wants the other one.

FOV Calculator features

The FOV formula

For a flat screen of width w at distance d, the horizontal field of view is FOV = 2 × atan(w ÷ 2d); the vertical FOV uses the height instead. The width comes from the diagonal and aspect ratio: for 16:9 it is the diagonal × 16 ÷ 18.36 (the diagonal of a 16 × 9 rectangle), so a 27-inch screen is 59.8 cm wide. At 60 cm away it covers 2 × atan(29.9 ÷ 60) = 53.0° horizontally and 31.3° vertically.

For a curved screen the edges bend towards you. Taking the screen width as the arc of a circle of radius R, an edge at arc angle a = (w/2) ÷ R sits at a half-angle of atan2(R sin a, d − R + R cos a). Sitting exactly at the centre of the curve (d = R), the FOV is simply the arc divided by the radius.

Triple screens and sim racing

With three screens, the ideal setup turns each side screen so it faces your eyes like the centre one. Each screen then covers the same angle, and the side screens are turned in by the angle one screen covers including its bezels — the calculator gives that turn and the inside angle between the screens. The total horizontal FOV is about three times one screen’s FOV, a little more once bezels are included.

Sim racing titles ask for FOV in different ways: some want the vertical FOV, some the horizontal FOV of one screen, and some have their own triple-screen settings with screen size, distance and angle. Read your title’s settings description and use the matching number. Being even a few degrees off makes speed and distances feel wrong.

Horizontal vs vertical FOV

They are linked by the aspect ratio: vertical = 2 × atan(tan(horizontal ÷ 2) ÷ aspect). 90° horizontal on 16:9 is 58.7° vertical; the same vertical view on a 4:3 screen is 73.7° horizontal. Many shooters define their FOV on a 4:3 or 16:9 reference and widen it on wider screens (“Hor+”), which is why the converter shows both.

Want the same aiming feel after changing FOV? Your turn distance does not change with FOV — see the sensitivity converter for cm/360.

TV and home cinema viewing distance

For films and console games on a TV, the commonly quoted guidance is a viewing angle of about 30° (attributed to SMPTE) to 36–40° (attributed to THX). We read these figures from secondary sources such as Audioholics, not the original documents, on 19 October 2026. The tool shows the distance for each angle for your screen: closer feels more immersive, further is more relaxed.