Widescreen Optimum Use

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 05:00:50PM -0500, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> Open source drivers for hardware without public specifications have
> suffered from this.  I've even experienced it with Intel open-source
> drivers (but not recently).

Well there has been some hardware where the video chip may have known
specs but the other components on the board could vary by board maker
and hence require different register settings to get a given resolution.
I belive this used to happen at least on some ATI based cards, especially
mobile chip designs.  Seems with the current chips almost everything is
reference design based, and almost everything is integrated into a single
chip so there isn't really any surprises left for the driver makers.

> Yes, but not so much these days.  Lots of old chips could not generate
> high resolutions.  Frame buffer size sometimes used to be a limitation
> on resolution too, but not for a long time.

These days they should not have any real limitations (perhaps a width
must be a multiple of 8 and such requirement but not much else).

> They are about 10 years old.  The monitor plugged into it is 12 years
> old.  Some of the computers connected to it are about a decade old
> too; one is two weeks old.

Well pretty pathetic KVM design to ignore such a useful feature that
all monitors would have had by then.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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