help with very high resolutions: over 1600x1200

[torchZ06]

does anybody have any experience with XFree at very high res'es? i've got a monitor that's preferred res is 1920x1200 @85Hz. and as you all know xfree only lists up to 1600x1200 in it's config program. i know i read somewhere that you can homebrew your own mode lines for additional resolutions, but i never tried it.

also what graphics card would you recommend for this job: strictly 2D and video, no games or 3D. priorities for my application are: very high res/refresh rates, best image quality, and good linux drivers/support.

i know matrox has a good rep for superior image quality, but how's their linux support?

thanks for any feedback....

patrick

[anyNiXwilldo]

Get a Nvidia card and be done with it. They have supported Linux for years and there drivers are fairly straightened out at this point.

As far as your Xfree config, try one of the following two online Xfree modeline generators. Hopefully one of the other will help:

http://xtiming.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/xtiming.pl

http://koala.ilog.fr/cgi-bin/nph-colas-modelines

These two links were taken from the following thread, which may offer additional help:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=89527&sid=66d127723a7a6cdb8874f60c026a8e9b
_________________
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[torchZ06]

thanks anyNiXwilldo,

first off, let me tell you that this story has a happy ending, so read on! i finally can run my FW900 as it was meant to and not need windows to do it!! "The Matrix" looked awesome in full HDTV widescreen 16:10 at 1920x1200@85Hz!

anyway i've been out of town and busy, so i haven't had much time to tweak on my boxes and so have just been living with bad, flickery 1600x1200 (H and V frequencies not matching what the monitor manual said they should be-- monitor thought it was 1920x1200, X thought it was 1600x1200). actually it's been that way for years and i've just lived with it. well i finally got some time and decided i was going to fix it or else and i messed around all day yesterday trying to get working modelines from both of those URLs, to no avail.

btw, i agree with the other post that the second website (colas) is much better at making modelines than the sourceforge one-- those ones didn't work at all. but it still didn't deliver what i needed....

i kept getting errors that my dot clock wouldn't go high enough to make the modes i wanted 1920x1200 and 1920x1080 (16:10 and 16:9 respectively). the monitor's max bandwidth is 380MHz and the card i was using (Asus Geforce2 MX400) topped out at 300MHz at 24bit and 350MHz in 16bit mode. i knew that card could drive those res'es under windows, so i couldn't figure out why it wouldn't work under X? hmm... windows black magic or something else....

well i gave up and went out and bought a new PNY GeForceFX 5200 from circuit city ($99) and low and behold it worked, but the image was all compressed and funky and the timings were not what they should have been as shown in the monitor manual. wtf?!?

what finally was the "eureka" moment happened when an odd thing kept occurring-- whenever it didn't like a modeline i tried it would default to the highest setting 2048x1536@75Hz and the H and V frequencies would match the listing in the sony manual EXACTLY. AND when by chance i hit CTRL-ALT-kpdMinus it scrolled to 1600x1200@85Hz (perfect this time, not screwed up as before) and then 1280x1024@85 and then 1152x864@85 and then 1024x768@85.... BINGO! it was tracing down the VESA modes in the table! all the other modes that i wanted were catagorized as GTF. well i didn't know what the heck GTF was, but a quick google later and here i find out there's a utility built into xorg-x11 (and probably xfree too) called, what else, gtf that will calculate the correct GTF modeline!! HOLY COW! it was there all the time!! so here's what i typed in: