Do monitors have a set resolution they can go to, and no further? I thought maybe this was controlled by the video card.
I’m not trying to pump mine up to 32,000 by 29,000 or anything, but I brought back an old monitor to college with me to hook up to my existing computer system. I hooked it up, and I’ve got the big continuous desktop thing going on, and I like it, but unfortunately it won’t go any higher than 800x600 (no lower either).
Are monitors self-limiting as to how much resolution you can squeeze onto the screen?
I have an Nvidia GeForce 4 Mx440 card, and the monitor is an old (OLD) Packard Bell we used on our Windows 3.1 machine probably almost 10 years ago (I said it was old).
IIRC it is the limitations of the monitor itself that limits the resolution regardless of the video card.
There are some limited workarounds available for running old monitors with modern pc’s and software and I am hopeful those more knowledgeable about such things will show up soon.
When you say it ‘won’t go’ any higher, do you mean that the option is not available, or do you mean that when you try it, the picture turns to awful flickering stripes?
I had an AT&T monitor that, if you set the resolution to 1024X768, it would emit a loud SNAP! and the displayed image would decay to a quivering cobra shape before going black. So from my experience, some monitors can’t handle it.
A GeForce 4 MX 440 can certainly put out a much higher resolution than 800x600. This means the problem is with the monitor itself, not the video card. The larger (and newer) the monitor, the higher resolution and refresh rate it can handle.
Upgrade thyself to a newer monitor. They’re getting cheaper every day.
If Windows is only offering you the option to go up to 800x600, then one (or both) of the following may be true:
-The video card drivers are not installed or working properly and Windows is fudging it with a generic driver.
-The monitor is not plugged into the output of the video card, but is connected to the output of an on-motherboard graphics device.
When I try it, the picture flickers or is completely unreadable. Interestingly, if I set the resolution to 1600x1200 (double what it is now), and also double the refresh rate, I get not only a really tiny version of what should be there, but THREE of them, spaced out across the screen. Three rectangles about two-three inches long/wide. Interesting, if useless phenomena.
Done it. It took quite a bit of futzing around with the settings in there before I even got ANY picture to show up. I’ve tried messing around with them to make it work with a higher resolution, hence the interesting result above, but no dice.
Like I said, it’s only a secondary monitor, which isn’t necessary. It’s useful, and interesting, but not necessary. Perhaps I’ll ask for one for my birthday, or money for one or something, but as of now, I don’t have the money, however little it may be.
Anyway, looks like it’s pretty much the monitor. Oh well, I’ll deal with it anyway. It’s better than nothing. It’s pretty cool to have my winamp visualizations running on this one and working on the other, or (as I’m doing now) surfing the web on this one and leaving chat open on the other.
I think the main limitation is the horizontal refresh rate, which is measured in KHz, and depends on the vertical resolution and vertical refresh rate.
Suppose you want to run at a vertical resolution of 1000 lines at a frame rate of 60 Hz. You’ll need a monitor that can sweep the beam horizontally across the screen at least 120,000 times per second (vrefresh * vres * 2); if your monitor can’t handle it, you’ll need to use a lower resolution and/or a lower vertical refresh rate.
My monitor is quite new, less than two years old, and it cannot go higher res than 1024 x 768. I had expected more from it, and had no real idea that newer monitors had such limits - I should’ve shopped around first.
Most old monitors were single-resolution. Most modern monitors are, in fact, marketed as multi-resolution monitors.
You can’t take an old VGA monitor and force it to render 786432 separate pixels (1024 x 768) when it only has the physical apparatus to make 307200 of them (640 x 480), any more than you can take a monochrome monitor and get 32-bit color out of it simply by installing a graphics card with more video RAM.