When is Nvidia going to fix their flat panel scaling?

lobski

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 17, 2008
Messages
460
Nvidia CP's fixed aspect ratio scaling has been broken for... About a year now? There is the "overscanenable.exe" workaround, but you need to restart your computer every time. Nvidia's forum is filled with users complaining about this problem. 4:3 Scaling is broken!

Super-duper frustrating, apparently Nvidia "thinks" they fixed it at ever new driver release....

Anyone know of any PERMANENT solutions?
 
Its broken? Really?

Its been working great for me with an 8800GT on Vista, I have had no problems playing Starcraft, Diablo 2, and other games that can't be made widescreen. What problems are happening? Can you give us some more details?
 
Basically, fixed aspect ratio doesn't work. It reverts back to a stretched-screen. If you google "Nvidia fixed aspect ratio" you get a whole ton of users with the problem
 
When I get home I'm going to check what drivers I'm using that work. I correctly get the black bars on both sides when I'm playing 4:3 games. I may be able to get you a driver number that will work. :)
 
I gave up on it since my new LCD can do 1:1/fixed aspect scaling itself. It's inexcusable that this major problem has existed so long.
 
Its broken? Really?

Its been working great for me with an 8800GT on Vista, I have had no problems playing Starcraft, Diablo 2, and other games that can't be made widescreen. What problems are happening? Can you give us some more details?

Yours is being run through your monitor, not through the drivers. Some people (myself included) have monitors that rely on software to change from widescreen to 4:3.

I fixed mine though. I don't remember the EXACT steps but its something like this..
Change your monitor type to an hdtv (even if it isn't) > change your resolution to something lower (non widescreen) > While in this lowered res, change the setting for aspect ratio > change back to native res and the setting will stick. You don't have to restart your computer every time you want to do it either.

I used this a lot before I got my xbox 360 to play nhl 07 (which doesn't support widescreen).





Edit: Still this is unexcusable from Nvidia. Its one thing to have broken drivers, its another to have an issue that is as MASSIVE as this and just ignore it.
 
It's always worked right for me (XP and Vista 64) 175.19s right now, and I know the monitor is not scaling it because it has no scaling over DVI (20WMGX2).
 
Currently using 175.16, 9600GT. I've had this problem, but fixed it by defining custom resolutions for each of the standard resolutions. Not the best solution, but it's working for now.

I was really quite annoyed, because I'd given up on ATI cards and went to nVidia specifically for fixed-aspect scaling - 3 days before the Catalyst 8.3 drivers came out. Now ATI's fixed-aspect scaling works much better than nVidia's - ATI may have taken a long time to get there, but they did a really good implementation in my experience.

OTOH, nVidia does have simple custom resolutions, which allows me to play games at unusal resolutions (e.g. 1152x720 is the best combination of text readability and avatar size in the Temple of Elemental Evil on my 22" LCD).
 
I'm on 177.79's. Tried that thing, and it doesn't work. As of 177's it seems the "Treat as HDTV" is gone, it's been replaced by "Force HD resolutions." Whenever I try to add custom resolution of 640x480 (Starcraft) it stretches, even if the previous resolution I was in (1600x1200) was scaled down 4:3. :mad:
 
Everything works for me except for 640x480, so Starcraft = stretchified. Ah well.
 
I haven't tried other resolutions, but I need Starcraft @ 4:3 640x480!
 
177.83 the flat panel scaling is working fine for me. Just remember that when you install new drivers, it disables fixed aspect scaling and you need to go in and restore it.
 
I just want to confirm the above. The scaling works again (finally) and the setting sticks with no voodoo necessary.
 
Yep, works fine me as well. SOF2 is the game I use it on.

EDIT: It doesn't work quite the way it used to. Must have changed something in the latest driver I guess.
 
Yep, it's still not working right. It's doing a weird stretch mode or centered timings with the fixed aspect setting. I went back to the panel's built in scaling. :rolleyes: Absolutely pathetic again.
 
This is what I see when I try to make it not scale on my new widescreen monitor.

hx6i9w.jpg


My 8800GT thinks my LCD is a CRT, so it is not even showing me those options! Anyone know a work around?
 
for me it works in xp, but not in vista. so I dont know what is up with that, but I do know it works with ati cards, because I had the hd 4870 before the gtx 280, Nvidia seems to have hard time fixing little things, I dont know why, ati seems to have taken them over in features when it comes to both crossfire and flat panel.
 
This is what I see when I try to make it not scale on my new widescreen monitor.

hx6i9w.jpg


My 8800GT thinks my LCD is a CRT, so it is not even showing me those options! Anyone know a work around?


That's probably because you are using VGA instead of DVI.
 
Man, I got a DVI cable, but it still stretches, even though I have "do not scale" set.
 
Does you monitor have an Auto Adjust?

Also try reinstalling the video drivers and find some drivers for your monitor.

Try setting it to "Use My Displays..." option.
 
Apparently flat screen scaling is still broken for some monitors. On my westy 37" scaling is still completely grayed out. I found a workaround by creating custom resolutions and manually setting the timings. These settings will give perfectly centered 1:1 images (disclaimer: use at your own risk! This will only work on 1080p monitors and even then probably only on Westinghouse 37w3's):

1440x1080
Porch: 92x20
Total: 2000x1118
Sync: 40x3
Polarity: -/+

1600x900
Porch: 12x110
Total: 2000x1118
Sync: 40x3
Polarity: -/+

1280x1024
Porch: 172x48
Total: 2000x1118
Sync: 40x3
Polarity: -/+

1280x800
Porch: 172x160
Total: 2000x1118
Sync: 40x3
Polarity: -/+

1024x768
Porch: 300x176
Total: 2000x1118
Sync: 40x3
Polarity: -/+

Anything below 1024x768 I can't get it to do 1:1 but the monitor will automatically do a 4:3 stretch.

Still waiting for nVidia to do a proper fix :mad:
 
I haven't had these problems at all, which is odd because everyone here is stating it is wide spread...

When I first had a 4870 I had these issues, and I felt nVidia's drivers for this were much better. Sure enough everything works perfectly on my GTX 280 and my V2400W... very odd that everyone else is having an issue.
 
FPS never worked for me with my 8800GTX, not once ever over the entire 16 months that I owned it.

Works perfectly every time on my 4850's, crossfired and individually.

*shrug*
 
Has anyone ever entertained that the LCDs in question may be at least partially at fault? Perhaps poor DVI communication standards? Has anyone ever opened a specific case with NV for a specific monitor that doesn't scale properly as compared to a specific monitor which does scale properly?

NV isn't going to magically fix problems that aren't reported, and the more specific the provided information, the faster and higher quality the fix will be.
 
Has anyone ever entertained that the LCDs in question may be at least partially at fault? Perhaps poor DVI communication standards?
If the video card is doing the scaling and the panel can not, it is nvidia's fault. :p

I had 3 different video cards in the time I had my prior LCD. The feature broke in the drivers over a year ago for the G80 series. It was working before and with some work-arounds it could still work. Older cards also do fixed aspect scaling correctly. My previous 7600GT did nvidia fixed aspect scaling perfectly on the same LCD.

Maybe you haven't really used the feature, but it was pretty obvious for a while where you would set nvidia scaling, click apply and the option would revert back to the prior setting. nvidia has fixed that part (finally), but the feature is still broken. I've pretty much given up on it since my new LCD can do scaling now.

What makes the whole situation ridiculous is that I had avoided ATI cards in my main system because ATI didn't support GPU scaled fixed-aspect ratio on desktop cards. Now they do and it works much better than on nvidia cards. I think it's going to take a web site publicly shaming nvidia into fixing this major problem.

BTW, nvidia's forum has been full of reports and complaints about this since nvidia broke the feature a long time ago. The feeble attempts at fixing it are not good enough.
 
If the video card is doing the scaling and the panel can not, it is nvidia's fault. :p

I had 3 different video cards in the time I had my prior LCD. The feature broke in the drivers over a year ago for the G80 series. It was working before and with some work-arounds it could still work. Older cards also do fixed aspect scaling correctly. My previous 7600GT did nvidia fixed aspect scaling perfectly on the same LCD.

I hear what you're saying, but that doesn't mean that some/part of the blame isn't on your previous LCD. Neither does "ATI works, NV does not".

It's POSSIBLE that the LCD is reporting something on the DVI about its capabilities which is causing NV cards to drop scaling or behave incorrectly. ATI may be ignoring whatever this flag is. For you, this fixes the problem, but it could cause some other problem for someone else trying to do something else by ignoring that flag. Consumer electronics are plagued by devices which are minimally or barely compliant with the standards they supposedly implement.

For most reports where someone says it's broken, someone else says it's working fine - "just like it always has". Same drivers, same GPU, different LCDs. What about different NV card manufacturers and card BIOS revs?

I'm merely playing devil's advocate on this. Maybe the affected community should start a specific info-gathering thread and get (more) organized. Anyone who's not affected could also provide input on their LCD make/model/brand/settings or exact NV card brand and BIOS level. Try to find the differences or at least report very specific info to your vendors and to NV. Hell, people started doing charts to study PhysX performance with various secondary cards - apply the same enthusiasm to the scaling problem if it's such a big deal...

Is posting in an NV forum the same as contacting NV or card vendor support and opening a ticket? Not always. I don't know about the specific ones you mentioned.

I don't even have an LCD yet, so I don't think I'll be volunteering to be secretary :)
 
I hear what you're saying, but that doesn't mean that some/part of the blame isn't on your previous LCD. Neither does "ATI works, NV does not".
How about breaking out all the cases I tested?

Let's call my old LCD "A" (no built in support for 1:1) and new LCD "B" (does have built in 1:1 support):

What worked:
------------
LCD A did nvidia fixed aspect ratio scaling with the 7600GT I originally had connected.

LCD A did Intel fixed aspect ratio scaling with the X3100 I had connected.

LCD A did ATI fixed aspect aspect ratio scaling with the HD 3870 and HD 4850 I had connected.

LCD B with nvidia control panel set to display scaling with the 8800GT and 9800GTX I had conencted.

What didn't work:
-----------------
LCD A did not do nvidia fixed aspect ratio scaling with any of the G80 and G90 series cards I had connected using many drivers I tried since I bought my first G8x series card last fall.

Ditto with LCD B since I bought it over a month ago.

Notice the pattern? :p

The thing is that I'm not alone with this problem. The scope isn't limited to a particular LCD. The functionality has simply been broken for a long time. On older cards, it worked great. Other than people who have displays with 1:1 support, and people who have done workarounds, virtually everyone has reported this problem with the last couple of generation of cards using drivers from the last year or so.

I'm not sure what you're arguing. You don't seem aware of the problem or how often complaints about it come up.
 
What I am arguing is that NV may not be totally at fault, and that it doesn't look like a SERIOUS effort to isolate the triggers has been undertaking by those that are so vocal.

I see people complaining about it all the time, followed immediately by others stating that it works perfectly fine for them.

I see someone in this thread say it doesn't work and it turns out they don't even have a DVI cable.

Someone else complains that it doesn't work on their specific monitor, and another person follows up that they needed to manually code the modes that their monitor supports. Someone else indicates that it's likely an EDID problem with the "Westy" not providing the card with the proper information it probably requires to enable/engage/support FPS. Makes sense to me - manually code in the monitor capabilities that it should have provided in the first place and hey, look at that, FPS works. In this case the workaround is for the monitor not doing what it is supposed to do.

If that's the "Westy's" problem, maybe it's the root cause for some other people. If the Westy has a crappy DVI implementation other units probably do too.

Collect data with a little more precision than "monitor A" and "8800GT" and perhaps a pattern WILL emerge.

I don't argue that it is working for FEWER people, even FAR FEWER, who use NV cards, but that doesn't mean there isn't an underlying non-compliance on the part of the display that is playing a part. As I said, consumer electronics are full of cheesy engineering and cut corners.

What is EDID?
EDID - Extended Display Identification Data is a VESA standard data format that contains basic information about a monitor and its capabilities, including vendor information, maximum image size, color characteristics, factory pre-set timings, frequency range limits, and character strings for the monitor name and serial number.

Have you ever run across anything like:

- it works for all NEC LCD users
- it works for all NEC 2690 users
(yes, I realize they have scalers, it's an example)
- it doesn't work for any Dell 3007 users
- it doesn't work for any Palit card users with BIOS newer than 2008-01

What are the work/don't work patterns?
 
I see someone in this thread say it doesn't work and it turns out they don't even have a DVI cable.

It doesn't work for me and I do have a DVI cable.

The only thing that works for me is when I run my 1440x900 monitor in a mode such as 1024x768, I can get it to either:

1)Stretch to fill the entire screen, out of aspect ratio

2)Centered image in the center of the screen

It will not scale the image to fill the screen with black bars on the side to keep the aspect ratio.
 
I read somewhere that this had to do with HDCP support on the DVI port, somehow the handshaking is not working out when graphics adapter is scaling the image. It could be bad HDCP implementation on either end (or both).

What's strange is ATI doesn't have this sort of problem. Maybe they are cheating and turning off HDCP when scaling is on?
 
I read somewhere that this had to do with HDCP support on the DVI port, somehow the handshaking is not working out when graphics adapter is scaling the image. It could be bad HDCP implementation on either end (or both).
That's what is worse. In my HTPC when I had an 8800GT plugged in through a DVI->HDMI adapter to my HDTV (HDCP compatible, of course), scaling worked great. That's the same as one of the work-arounds though. Force the LCD to be recognized as a HDTV, but in my case it really was a HDTV.
 
I agree with pxc. I have that 24" LG monitor that's featured in one of the threads here. None of my NVIDIA cards would scale the resolution. I had to do this to solve my problem (which I hate doing) I first had to change my resolution of my desktop to something that is not the native 1900x1200. Then it would allow me to change to ANY resolution with the correct aspect ratio. But!!!! If I did select 1900x1200 it would lock that resolution and it then wouldn't allow me to have a different resolution because it would just stretch it to fill the screen.

Try Mame32 or now called MameUI. That program allows custom resolutions to show up on the monitor with no problems. (with a 8800GTS 512Mb card). So if MameUI can overide the LCD Monitors so called, "fixed problem" then I would clearly point the problem to NVIDIA.

Is this an NVIDIA problem? You betcha!!!
 
Is this an NVIDIA problem? You betcha!!!

Again, at this time I'd say "Is this a problem illustrated on Nvidia? - You betcha!!!" is more accurate. Nothing you've said proves it isn't the monitor's EDID table, DVI or HDCP implementation causing the NV ASIC to shut off scaling. There *could* be a very good reason for this behaviour which isn't readily understood by the user base.

I've run across plenty of things in my career that seem stupid and broken when first encountered, but there ends up being a very good reason for the behaviour - often either safety or standards-compliance based. Years ago one such thing was a ~30kVA online datacenter UPS which would shut down its output in various situations when mains power was restored. Seems stupid right? I'm forgetting the details but it turns out it was part of a lineman safety standard and other changes were necessary to result in the behaviour we required. The default behaviour was to protect load equipment from surges and dirty power, and it would be nice to keep it up without interruption (ie. more like medical diagnostic equipment like MRIs) instead of "keep this up at all costs" like a computing datacenter. IIRC, other types of operation allowed the load to be dropped when mains power returned because frequency slewing to resynchronize the load with the grid was not permitted but interrupting power to reset was. Go figure. Here the goal was maximum overall uptime during short interruptions where frequency didn't deviate or over long power outages, but dropping power briefly to come back online was "OK".

So, maybe there's a reason (other than a bug) why scaling is disabled when a panel's EDID information isn't up to spec and doesn't include something that the ASIC is looking for. Or maybe it's a part of the HDCP spec that ATI is ignoring. Or, maybe it is a bug, and getting specific about it might get it fixed.

Would something like EDID viewer (link here) perhaps show enough information for some of you to start exploring whether certain monitors' EDID info doesn't allow NV FPS to work properly?

I'm not sure how to examine the HDCP side of things...

Have you opened a ticket with your card vendor?
 
I'll discribe my way the last 1,5 Years.

i have tried:
6200, 7600GT, 7900GT , now 8200 (onboard)

the 7900GT was perfectly able fix aspect ratio under Windows XP

but all of these Card couldn't do it on Vista.

with 8.3 Catalyst , ATI had also aspect ratio fix.(works @Vista)

i also got the "nvlddmkm"-Bug with my Nvidia Cards which no one knows why it occurs.
so finally i switched to ATI 3870 which is currently working fine.
time passed
and thesemajor bugs are still unfixed for over a year?

now i wanted to by a 260 GTX (and use Hybrid Power)
But on the Internet i see many Threads poping up that this is also not working.

never going to buy an Nvidia Card for Vista again until they fix this.
 
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