God-freakin-dammit, I hate ATI

[Moraelin v2.0]

OK, so I have an ATI 1900xtx and an Acer 2032W TFT. Now I'm still not that great a fan of TFTs for fast games, but it's an IPS that worked well for MMOs and the like. It's also an 1680x1050 widescreen.

The first problem? It's cretinous enough to report itself as an 1600x1200. Still with any Nvidia card I could just tell the detonators to send an 1680x1050 image to the TFT and let the TFT rescale it. (Since it's its native resolution, no scaling happened.)

The _real_ problem? Obviously some cretin at ATI decided that, nah, let's not trust the user or Windows drivers. Let's not trust the TFT to be able to rescale the image itself either.

It reads the 1600x1200 info from the monitor, and from there the _only_ options are:

A) The card will scale the image for me to 1600x1200.

B) The card will center the image in an 1600x1200 image and output that to the TFT.

In both cases then the monitor resizes it again, since 1600x1200 isn't actually its native resolution. It's so fuzzy it makes my eyes water.

There's no way to even ****ing get a widescreen resolution, scaled or not. So even with the fuzzy double-rescaling, I can't actually get a resolution that uses the whole screen surface.

And yes, it happens with the 6.6 Catalysts too. That's why I'm trying this monitor again: the release notes promised to fix the problem of missing 1680x1050 resolution. Nope, obviously it still doesn't work. (And FFS, it's been known at least since the 5.7 Catalysts.)

But seriously, what gets on my nerves is the cretinous attitude that, nah, they know better than the user. There's no way to override it, there's no way to tell it to use the Windows driver for that info, there's no way to tell it to just freakin' output the image as it is and let the monitor do the scaling. Nah, some cretin at ATI decided that I'm obviously too much of an idiot to be trusted with such high-tech options. Once it detects a DVI cable, that's that, all those options are gone.

And you know what? I wish that that kind of cretins would die a slow painful death already.

You know what else? I've just about had enough of ATI anyway.

[MuFu]

...and breeaaaaath.

Seriously though, sounds like a really frustrating problem. I wonder if they are having issues with non-compliant configuration data from the display. Some 1680x1050 monitor/X1900 combos don't seem to be affected.

Have you tried the latest Omega drivers?

[Moraelin v2.0]

Oh, I'm convinced that the issue is the fact that the monitor reports 1600x1200 as the highest supported resolution.

I do however consider it utterly stupid of ATI to just take the highest reported resolution and not allow the user or the display drivers any control. Why is that stupid? Because there's a metric buttload of monitors out there who do the same thing. There are quite a few 1280x1024 monitors who report 1600x1200, for example. Even Iiyama makes at least one, for example.

So I can only ask myself how many such people with 1280x1024 displays get an image that was scaled by ATI to 1600x1200 and then scaled down by the monitor to the native 1280x1024.

[Justintime]

Try setting the catylst display to not use DDC information and set max res and refresh rate manually.

[Moraelin v2.0]

Well, the question is: how? I know that the option is there for analog monitors (including TFTs over a VGA cable), but for DVI I see no such option.

[Justintime]

Ah.. well that is a problem then

[krupted]

stupid question but do you have monitor drivers installed? i dont think you need them for dvi, but it may help?

[Moraelin v2.0]

Yep, they're installed.

[krupted]

this whole 4:3 and 16:9 format wars has turned into a big mess. i thought 4:3 was going to be phased out, but it seems they like having 9 different aspect ratios just to make everything not work with eachother...

[ol' man]

Glussier talked about editing the reg before to make other resolutions possible before?

[krupted]

but wouldnt that be just for analog monitors? i thought dvi specs were all done through the hardware on the monitor itself. or am i way off?

[kaulbach]

I just looked through his 20 pages of latest posts and could find nothing on this subject to pull out for here

[MuFu]

PowerStrip? Omega Drivers?

[ol' man]

but wouldnt that be just for analog monitors? i thought dvi specs were all done through the hardware on the monitor itself. or am i way off?

I was having problems on my DVI port and this was a possible solution. The other was to uncheck "hide modes that this monitor does not support"

Or the final answer was to acquire the monitor drivers.

[ThreeOnTheTree]

heh, I've been doing some searching to see if I can help, and when I punched in "Acer 2032W and ATI" into Yahoo, this thread was the number one link.

Acer has this to say:
http://www.acerpanam.com/synapse/for...ords=&areaid=7

ATI Video Card Configuration


DVI or VGA Connections.

Note: some OEM versions of the ATI cards (like the 9250SE), will not support the 1680x1050 resolution in both DVI and VGA modes.



If the recommended 1680x1050 resolution setting does not appear, try changing the "hide modes state"



1. Right click on the desktop, choose "Properties" to get the Display Properties Window.

2. Click on the "Settings" tab, then click the "Advanced" button.

3. Click on the "Monitor Tab" then un-check the "Hide Modes that this monitor cannot display" check box.