mycroes

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Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Enabling higher resolutions on Matrox G200eW

Recently we bought 5 DELL PowerEdge T110 servers to deploy to customers. After installing Windows XP on the PERC S100 RAID (more on that in a future post) I had to look for a driver for the graphics card. Of course you can't easily find it at Matrox's site, so I went over to DELL support and downloaded the Windows Server 2003 Matrox driver. Server 2003 and XP both being NT5 this worked like a charm, as was to be expected. There is another issue however, by default the Matrox driver supports 4:3 resolutions up to 1280x1024, but we use widescreen monitors which can do 1920x1080, and we're relying on that.

Just a week ago I was fiddling with Matrox drivers for a G450, where I had the same issue with resolutions, where the latest driver did support the correct 16:9 resolutions. When I was comparing the drivers, I noticed there's a resolution reference directly in the driver inf file. For the G200eW, this listed just a few resolutions, but for the G450 there was a long list. Changing this value to what the G450 had listed was enough to get it working, so now our G200eW can do 1920x1080 without issues. Here's the changed value for future reference:
HKR,,Mga.SingleResolutions,0x00000001,\
40,01,C8,00,40,01,F0,00,00,02,80,01,80,02,90,01,\ ; 320x 200, 320x 240, 512x 384, 640x 400
80,02,E0,01,20,03,58,02,50,03,E0,01,58,03,E0,01,\ ; 640x 480, 800x 600, 848x 480, 856x 480
60,03,E0,01,C0,03,60,09,00,04,00,02,00,04,00,03,\ ; 864x 480, 960x2400, 1024x 512, 1024x 768
00,04,00,05,00,04,00,06,30,04,58,02,80,04,60,03,\ ;1024x1280, 1024x1536, 1072x 600, 1152x 864
B0,04,40,06,00,05,D0,02,00,05,00,03,00,05,20,03,\ ;1200x1600, 1280x 720, 1280x 768, 1280x 800
00,05,C0,03,00,05,00,04,00,05,40,06,50,05,00,03,\ ;1280x 960, 1280x1024, 1280x1600, 1360x 768
58,05,00,03,60,05,00,03,78,05,1A,04,A0,05,84,03,\ ;1368x 768, 1376x 768, 1400x1050, 1440x 900
40,06,00,04,40,06,B0,04,40,06,00,05,90,06,1A,04,\ ;1600x1024, 1600x1200, 1600x1280, 1680x1050
00,07,40,05,08,07,A0,05,40,07,70,05,80,07,0A,04,\ ;1792x1344, 1800x1440, 1856x1392, 1920x1034
80,07,38,04,80,07,B0,04,80,07,A0,05,00,08,00,06 ;1920x1080, 1920x1200, 1920x1440, 2048x1536