On Fri, Apr 23, 2004 at 12:06:32AM -0600, Ross Werner wrote: > In XFree86, are the possibly refresh rates and screen modes dictated > solely by the monitor, or does the video card also affect them?
The video card can be pretty important.
> I have a 17" Dell M770 monitor, which _should_ be able to do 1024x768 at
> 75 Hz, but the best I can get is 1024x768 with 8-bit color, and the
> refresh rate is definitely _not_ 75 Hz. (I don't know how to exactly check
> the refresh rate though. How do you do that?)
>
> The video card is just some cheap S3 Trio ("Unsupported RAMDAC" according
> to the X auto configure thing). ... could its cheapness be the cause of my
> troubles? What sort of video card would I need to get in order to run X at
> a decent resolution and refresh rate?
Certainly the color depth is affected by the video card. You have to
have enough memory on the card to support your resolution and depth. In
your example, the card has at least 1024 times 768 bytes of memory. For
16 bit color you would need at least 1024 times 768 times 2.
And someone please correct me: isn't it the RAMDAC that allows you to
change refresh rates?
In any case, newer cards with more memory will let you do cooler stuff.
--
Andrew McNabb
http://www.mcnabbs.org/andrew/
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