Ubuntu – Does Nvidia Settings have different resolutions than the Monitor option

11.04nvidiaresolution

I checked the resolutions in System -> Preferences -> Monitors and it has different resolutions than the System -> Administration -> Nvidia X Server Settings

I have installed the proprietary Nvidia Drivers from the Additional Drivers options (jockey-gtk) version 270.41.06

Now my question is why the difference and how can i (if possible) make them the same)

Best Answer

The reason is that the Monitors capplet uses the XRandR protocol to do multi-monitor and resolution changes. The proprietary nvidia drivers only support an old and restrictive version of this protocol, so it's entirely possible to have a system where the information the Monitors capplet gets from the nvidia driver is different from the information that the NVidia Settings (which uses an nvidia-specific protocol to talk to the driver) gets.

This means that there are two options for making the resolutions displayed the same:

  • Add code to the Monitors capplet to talk the nvidia-specific protocol to the nvidia driver (as suggested in this question)
  • Have nvidia implement more modern XRandR support in their driver, so the nvidia driver can expose the relevant information in the same way that all the other drivers do.

Neither of which is likely to be immediately useful to you, sorry. Just use nvidia-settings for now.

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