Thanks for collecting the information. Great project.

Regarding retro gaming via DVI, I'm also curious to know what display modes the cards default to prior to loading Windows. I guess the two expected output behaviors are either no scaling/fixed scaling at 70 Hz or forced scaling to the display's native resolution at its native refresh rate, the latter of which messes with game compatibility under DOS. It might depend on the specific card + display combo, I'm not quite sure about the interaction via EDID/DDC.

It would be good if you can provide the EDID mode table for your test monitor for the high res modes in a table where the rows are aspect ratio and columns with resolutions. With just maximum ratings you are guessing that it might support all lower modes (but does it actually?).
Also maximum actual supported mode of each card. Otherwise it is unclear if the Card, the EDID or the driver is limiting.

firage wrote:

Thanks for collecting the information. Great project.

Regarding retro gaming via DVI, I'm also curious to know what display modes the cards default to prior to loading Windows. I guess the two expected output behaviors are either no scaling/fixed scaling at 70 Hz or forced scaling to the display's native resolution at its native refresh rate, the latter of which messes with game compatibility under DOS. It might depend on the specific card + display combo, I'm not quite sure about the interaction via EDID/DDC.

I can test the DOS mode on AGP cards, going into BIOS setup and see what mode monitor reports should be sufficient, right?
Scaling to native LCD resolution (on the GPU side) most likely won't work on any of these GPUs. As far as I know, support for this starts with Fermi and later nvidia GPU, not sure about AMD.

elianda wrote:

It would be good if you can provide the EDID mode table for your test monitor for the high res modes in a table where the rows are aspect ratio and columns with resolutions. With just maximum ratings you are guessing that it might support all lower modes (but does it actually?).
Also maximum actual supported mode of each card. Otherwise it is unclear if the Card, the EDID or the driver is limiting.

Well, as long as the pixel clock and other timings are not exceeded, it should display pretty much anything I guess.... or not? IIRC dual-link DVI officially supports 2560x1600 @ 60 Hz so at 2560x1440 it should allow slightly higher refresh and still fit the bandwidth. Which is not the case here anyway.

Also I don't think we really need all lower modes. If GPU and driver supports lets say 1920x1200, then I'm 100% sure it will run 1680x1050 and 1280x800 also... there is no reason for not to support it. After all these are all standard resolutions. Things like 1920x1440 (4:3) or 1440x1080 are more or less custom resolutions (might depend on driver used) but once again if the GPU can run it, then it shouldn't show any issues using one step lower - 1600x1200 or 1280x1024 (which both are standard). The possibility of GPU being able to handle higher mode but fail at lower mode (of the same aspect ratio) is very slim imho.

The table in OP shows maximum mode which can be set in 3D accelerated games. Of course this is not limited to what driver offers. I'm trying to force unsupported resolutions or create custom one (like 1920x1440). If this can run successfully, then it is in the list. I'm always trying to reach maximum resolution supported by HW.

For retro-gaming you want to look at resolution modes below 1280x1024, really. There are very few DOS games that took advantage of resolutions above 1024x768. LCD monitors will often fail to display the really old low resolution modes properly (image gets offset beyond the screen border, excessive flickering, etc.), or they don't display them at all. So knowing which LCD monitors can actually properly display such resolutions is a major asset when building a retro system and wanting the avoid a huge, heavy, and frail CRT. Furthermore, some older computers use rarer horizontal refresh rates, meaning a LCD that can support anything beyond the current standard horizontal refresh rate is interesting...

DOS gaming is not what I'm aiming at. Pretty much any GPU will do at least 1024x768. Anyway these low-res modes depend more on the actual LCD rather than GPU... and I seriously doubt anyone would play DOS games on 144Hz WQHD. 😈

I've used a lot of old cards with my Dell 2405FPW (1920x1200).

-NV10 SGI V3 GeForce 256 DVI = can't do 1920x1200.
-NV15 Quadro 2 DVI = can't do 1920x1200.
Both the above are either 1600x1024 or 1280x1024 limited.
http://www.siliconbunny.com/mirrors/www.sgi.c … nvidia_faq.html
-NV20 GF3 DVI = 1920x1200 ok.
-NV25 GF4Ti DVI = 1920x1200 ok.
-NV34 5200 DVI = Some cards don't work well above 1280x1024.
-NV35 5900 Ultra DVI = 1920x1200 ok.
-NV40 6800 Ultra DVI = 1920x1200 ok.
Noteably, the NV10-NV35 (except NV34) use the same Silicon Image DVI transmitter chip. Still, behavior and compliance varies.

-RV200 7500 DVI = No display until Windows driver initializes but then 1920x1200 is ok.
-R200 8500 DVI = No display until Windows driver initializes but then 1920x1200 is ok.
-R300 9700 DVI = 1920x1200 fine
Everything newer has worked fine too. RV350, R350, R420, R480, R580, R600....

-Matrox Parhelia is fine at 1920x1200.

I have seen the DOS / BIOS behavior vary. Some cards output at a non-native resolution and the monitor scales. Other cards always output 1920x1200. It's also important to set 60 Hz on DVI or the 2405FPW seems to drop frames.

Thanks, interesting info.

Weird - my 6800 Ultra didn't work at 1920x1200. It simply remained at 1920x1080 and desktop was extended via mouse-scroll. Same behavior on both DVI - one driven by internal TMDS and the other one by SIL164CT64. Perhaps some software issues... I'll investigate this further.

Your R200 was working at 1920x1200 even in 3D mode? Because mine wasn't - desktop was fine even at 2560x1440 @ 60Hz (which is very strange considering it was running single-link DVI), but when going 3D everything above 1280x1024 resulted in black screen after few seconds.

havli wrote:

Thanks, interesting info.

Weird - my 6800 Ultra didn't work at 1920x1200. It simply remained at 1920x1080 and desktop was extended via mouse-scroll. Same behavior on both DVI - one driven by internal TMDS and the other one by SIL164CT64. Perhaps some software issues... I'll investigate this further.

Your R200 was working at 1920x1200 even in 3D mode? Because mine wasn't - desktop was fine even at 2560x1440 @ 60Hz (which is very strange considering it was running single-link DVI), but when going 3D everything above 1280x1024 resulted in black screen after few seconds.

I can't say for sure if I've tried running games at 1920x1200 on Radeon 8500....

Did you know that GF 7800 was the first card with internal buffers sized for good rendering efficiency at > 1600x1200?
http://techreport.com/review/8538/uber-high-r … g-on-today-gpus

Maybe I will throw together an AGP setup for some testing.

Ok I put together a nForce3 Ultra system and did some testing with the Radeon 8500 128MB. XP SP3, Catalyst 6.11. I actually saw a boot screen with it on DVI during one boot-up, but there was extreme artifacting in the image.

I ran 3DMark2001 at 1920x1200 and it seemed to work fine.