NVidia’s driver and resolution problems
Since I updated my Fedora Core 5’s X11 drivers to use the official nvidia driver (packaged by livna), I got a strange problem: the only supported resolution was 1680×1050, which is my widescreen LCD max resolution from my laptop. When I tried to play games like Armagetron and LBreakout2, the fullscreen wasn’t working because when the fullscreen mode is activated, the program automatically resize the X server resolution and scales the game to go fullscreen. But this wasn’t happening! Typing CTRL+ALT+[-/+] didn’t help either…
I tried many configurations, many. Looking at the Xorg logs (/var/log/Xorg.0.log) I realized that the problem was with something about the EDID checking and definying automatically the Horizonal and Vertical frequencies and resolution modes. So I found out that putting the option:
Option "UseEdidFreqs" "False"
In section "Device", I could manually define my modes. I hope this information could be useful for anyone.
My Xorg configuration
So this is my xorg.conf, containing the configuration for my laptop (which is a HP Pavilion zv5000, with GeForce 440 Go 64MB and a 15.4 Widescreen LCD).
There are a couple of regressions (from user pov anyway, NVIDIA says, the behaviour is expected) in the newest release. One is that the custom modelines must not be named in generic way (eg. “1600×1200”), because those will be overridden by the edid ones. One must use sth unique (eg. “1600x1200_85”) for ones own modelines. Also the EDID related config options have changed a bit (see the driver README.) Tvout is also broken unless xorg.conf is edited to reflect the changes.
Check the various threads at the Linux forum at nvnews.net.