Ubuntu – How to see/change screen refresh rate or monitor frequency

You should be able to use xrandr. Calculate the needed modelines for your resolution and refresh rate:

cvt 1600 900 75

(Here my example resolution is 1600x900.) Now create a new mode with xrandr:

xrandr --newmode "1600x900_75.00" 104.00 1600 -hsync +vsync

Add the new mode to xrandr:

xrandr --verbose --addmode VGA-0 "1600x900_75.00"

and activate it

xrandr --output VGA-0 --mode "1600x900_75.00"

Note that your values will be different. In particular, your monitor might not be VGA. Run the xrandr command with no arguments to find out the name of your monitor and use that instead. Running xrandr -q will display a list of available outputs.

Here's some more information on xrandr.

After reading 113 blog posts, SO questions, and other attempts at solving this problem, my refresh rate was still lost on reboot.

From there I combed through man pages and played with dozens of utilities. During that process I discovered the following one-liner works on my 64 bit machine with a GTX 760.

xrandr --output DVI-D-0 --mode 1920x1080 --rate 144

This targets the device connected via DVI-D-0, sets the resolution to 1920W by 1080H, and forces a refresh rate of 144 Hz.

To determine the value for --output, run the following command

xrandr -q

Which will display information like the following.

You can see the second to last entry is where I found the device name, as well as supported settings.

I call this script from "Startup Applications" to ensure that it runs immediately following log in. I'm not 100% happy with that solution, because the screens flickers immediately after entering my password. If you can live with that (I can), then this solves the issue.