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Re: nvidia driver and monitor with wqxga 2560 x 1600



Adam Hardy wrote:
RParr on 22/02/07 20:48, wrote:
Adam Hardy wrote:
Would it be reasonable to assume that the nvidia driver will run with a new video card and monitor with 2560 x 1600 resolution? In etch?

I'm not finding the information on nvidia's website, or on the web at all for that matter.

I am driving the Dell 30" using a eVGA nVidia 7800GT with etch and nVidia drivers. It works great.

The primary "trick" is to make sure you get a board with at least one DVI that supports DUAL-LINK DVI. At the time I set this up a lot of boards had dual DVI but both DVI only supported single-link DVI. To drive a display 1900x1200 or larger you generally need a DVI port supporting dual-link DVI (and a dual-link DVI cable).

These days most newer cards support at least one dual-link DVI. Those based on the nVidia G71 (eg 7900) generally support dual-DVI.

Once I had a dual-link DVI card and the nVidia drivers installed I only had to tweak the xorg.conf file a bit (mode-line, DPI, and limit resolutions available to 2560x1600 and 1280x800) to get it work great.

I eventually found what I was looking for on the nvidia website - I was just completely overlooking the link to the specs.

It is a Dell 30" monitor, as Greg guessed, they've just slashed the price by 20% so I decided to go for it.

However annoying the computer I want (a very-pc.com low energy machine based on a laptop mobo) has a built-in Intel GMA 950 which does only 2048x1536, annoyingly short of the 2560x1600 of the 30" monitor!

I assume this means I won't be able to take full advantage of the monitor if I run it with this chipset. But would I be able to run the monitor at 2048 width res?

It says 2560x1600 is the 'natural' resolution - so does that imply problems trying to run it at other resolutions?


The 2048x1536 is probably the highest VGA (ie analog) resolution and not the max DVI resolution. The max DVI resolution is probably (at best) 1920x1200 and very likely less.

LCD monitors have a fixed number of pixels (eg. 2560x1600). Any other resolution must be scaled to fit those pixels. Scaling 1280x800 to 2560x1600 works OK (not great but OK). Others are just not going to work at all well. You will be very unhappy with non-standard (ie natural) resolutions.

The best bet is to disable the motherboard graphics and install a video board which does support dual-link DVI at 2560x1600.

R.Parr, RHCE, Temporal Arts



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