Nvidia flat-panel scaling

[M0RPH]

Some of you may know me, I've only ever owned ATI cards but recently I decided to try my first ever Nvidia card because I wanted to try these flat panel scaling options I kept hearing about. So I bought a 7900GS from the Woot deal. Just got it working today because it turns out I needed a new power supply.

Anyway, at first I installed the Dell/Nvidia drivers that Woot recommended. I didn't get the option for 1440x900 resolution. So I removed those and installed the latest drivers from Nvidia's site, version 91.47. I got the resolution I needed and everything seemed to be ok. So I went to the flat panel scaling settings.

Let me say first that my Westinghouse LCM-19W4 has no settings for scaling whatsoever. It always takes whatever it gets and scales it to fit the screen. First I tried the Centered Output option in the Nvidia drivers. It gives me a plain blue screen with black bars on the top and bottom. Something wrong there. I tried setting the resolution to something low like 800x600. Now I do get a small window surrounded by black on all sides as I expected, except it appears to be stretched wide and it's all blurry like it's being scaled. When I check the status on my monitor it says that it's displaying a 1280x1024 signal. I also tried the Fixed Aspect Ratio Scaling and it also doesn't work properly, again feeding my monitor a 1280x1024 signal.

It's as if the drivers think my monitor is a native 1280x1024 display and so they are padding the resolution out to that, even though the control panel lists my monitor's native resolution correctly as 1440x900. So, long story short, the one feature that I bought this card for doesn't work, which is pretty dissapointing. Anyone have any idea what's going on here and how I can get this scaling to work properly? Thank you.

 

[kmmatney]

My wife has a Viewsonic 19" LCD with the same resolution (and no built-in scaling options) and it refuses to scale for either ATI or NVidia cards. I have 2 other BenQ LCDs that scale fine with either cards - although ATI scaling requires that at least one side of the screen be native. NVidia card can scale in both directions with the BenQ LCDs.

However the 19" Viewsonic didn't scale no matter what I tried. Luckily, my wife liked the LCD, so I gave it to her.

Are you using the DVI connector? That has a better chance of scaling. ATI cards can do limited scaling, but in my experience at least one side has to be native. For instance, you can scale a 1280 x 1024 LCD to 1280 x 960. At least my ATI card does that OK.

Did you try all 4 timing options in the NVidia driver?

 

[BassBomb]

dvi scales absolutely to any resolution when you set digital flat panel settings to centered output i believe... and then it will give black bars

however without dvi (like me), running fixed aspect ratio only works on 1280x960 (top and bottom black bars)

 

[hmorphone]

Does this issue lay more with the drivers or with the monitors? (I'm looking at stepping up from CRT to LCD)

 

[M0RPH]

I'm using a DVI connection. I've tried all 4 of the scaling options and the only one that works correctly is the default one, Monitor Scaling. If I leave the res at native 1440x900 and set it to one of the other 3, I get a garbled or blank screen. If I set it to some low resolution and one of those 3 options, I get a result that's not quite right, being stretched wider than it should be. In all cases if I check the monitor status display, it shows as 1280x1024. If it was working properly it would be showing 1440x900 since the Nvidia drivers are supposed to pad the res out to the monitor's native res. If I can't get this to work, the card will be going to Ebay.

 

[postmortemIA]

try some older drivers, like 84.21

It should work with DVI though- works for me on all my nVIDIA cards: 6600, 6800Ultra, 7300 Go. All three are running DVI, on 2 samsung, one epson (laptop) screen.

 

[imported_Crusader]

make sure you have your lcd driver installed.. i always put the latest file from dell on my fresh formats.
theres nothing wrong with your lcd or video card, you just need to figure out whats going on. all nv driver versions have worked perfect with scaling on my 2005fpw.
i can vouch for the fact that nvidia scaling is superior to my lcds built-in scaling as it results in a better image than my dell can do. superb implementation.

im also guessing you prob just yanked out your ati card and popped in the nvidia without using drivercleaner in safemode. i would suggest a format if you've been using a lot of ati products (which unfortunately include ATI drivers) for that long, but DC should do the trick.

might want to contact this guy and see if it worked for him http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/fo...3&sid=8cc41d44ee8902dfed90223e765a0527

good luck, but im guessing you are nearly crossing your fingers it doesnt work for you. it does for the rest of us though, so hope you get it figured out.

 

[M0RPH]

Originally posted by: postmortemIA
try some older drivers, like 84.21

I can't go back that far because they don't support the 7900GS. I did try 91.33 which were the first to support this card, but no change.

Found some threads on other forums and it seems lots of others are having this same problem.

http://forums.nvidia.com/lofiversion/index.php?t12956.html
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=66608

Might be a problem with 1440x900 monitors since that's most of the people complaining. Ah well, so much for Nvidia having better drivers than ATI in this regard.

PS. If anyone has a 1440x900 LCD monitor and Nvidia scaling works, I'd love to hear from you.