WQUXGA – IBM T221 3840×2400 204dpi Monitor – Part 5: When You Are Really Stuck With a SL-DVI

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I recently had to make one of these beasts work bearably well with only a single SL-DVI cable. This was dictated by the fact that I needed to get it working on a graphics card with only a single DVI output, and my 2xDL-DVI -> 2xLFH-60 adapter was already in use. As I mentioned previously, I found the standard 1xSL-DVI’s worth 13Hz to be just too slow when it comes to a refresh rate (I could see the mouse pointer skipping along the screen), but the default 20Hz from 2xSL-DVI was just fine for practically any purpose.

So, faced with the need to run with just a single SL-DVI port, it was time to see if a bit of tweaking could be applied to reduce the blanking periods and squeeze a few more FPS out of the monitor. In the end, 17.1Hz turned out to be the limit of what could be achieved. And it turns out, this is sufficient for the mouse skipping to go away and make the monitor reasonably pleasant to use.

(Note: My wife disagrees – she claims she can see the mouse skipping at 17.1Hz. OTOH, she is unable to read my normal font size (MiscFixed 8-point) on this monitor at full resolution. So how you get along with this setup will largely depend on whether your eyes’ sensitivity is skewed toward high pixel density or high frame rates.)

The xorg.conf I used is here:

Section "Monitor"
  Identifier    "DVI-0"
  HorizSync    31.00 - 105.00
  VertRefresh    12.00 - 60.00
  Modeline "[email protected]"  165.00  3840 3848 3880 4008  2400 2402 2404 2406 +hsync +vsync
EndSection

Section "Device"
  Identifier    "ATI"
  Driver        "radeon"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
  Identifier    "Default Screen"
  Device        "ATI"
  Monitor        "DVI-0"
  DefaultDepth    24
  SubSection "Display"
    Modes    "[email protected]"
  EndSubSection
EndSection

The Modeline could easily be used to create an equivalent setting in Windows using PowerStrip or a similar tool, or you could hand-craft a custom monitor .inf file.

In the process of this, however, I have discovered a major limitation of some of the Xorg drivers. Generic frame buffer (fbdev) and VESA (vesa) drivers do not support Modelines, and will in fact ignore them. ATI’s binary driver (fglrx) also doesn’t support modelines. Linux CCC application mentions a section for custom resolutions, but there is no such section in the program. So if you want to use a monitor in any mode other than what it’s EDID reports, you cannot use any of these drivers. This is a hugely frustrating limitation. In the case of fbdev driver, it is reasonably forgiveable because it relies on whatever modes the kernel frame buffer exposes. In the case of the VESA driver it is understandable that it only supports standard VESA modes. But ATI’s official binary driver lacking this feature is quite difficult to forgive – it has clearly be dumbed down too far.