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    Unreadable display with Nvidia driver

    This past weekend I repurposed my desktop into a media center-type PC, mainly for playing and streaming movies as well as the occasional NES/SNES/PSX/PS2 game through my favorite emulators. I bought a new 1080p TV to take the place of my Acer monitor and did a clean install of Kubuntu 14.04. The PC has my old but trusty EVGA GeForce GTX 750Ti card to handle the graphics output. When I installed the recommended Nvidia driver through Kubuntu's Driver Manager it made everything unusable. I went from this:



    to this:



    As you can see in the second pic, the icons are slightly smaller and the text is tiny enough so as to be completely unreadable. With my Acer screen I never had any issues at all with the Nvidia graphics driver, so I'm guessing there's some type of issue with how the card communicates with the TV. The Nouveau driver works mostly fine - high-bitrate 1080p video playback looks just as good as I would expect it to - but I get a lot of artifacting in text display (Terminal, etc.) to the point that it's distracting and makes things difficult to read.

    Anyone have any thoughts on settings or alternatives I could look into? As always, thanks in advance.

    **EDIT**

    Having done some additional reading I found that some people have issues with 4K displays so I felt I should clarify that I am NOT using a 4K TV. I simply went from a 23" 1080p monitor to a 49" 1080p TV. One would THINK that going from one 1080p display to another would have little or no effect since they are both the same resolution. And, again, the problem does not present itself until I am using the Nvidia driver.
    Last edited by GKNByNW; Mar 18, 2019, 06:09 PM. Reason: Additional information

    #2
    Older thread, but...

    Read through this in its entirety. Not a super long thread. https://www.kubuntuforums.net/showth...l=1#post361688
    Using Kubuntu Linux since March 23, 2007
    "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data." - Sherlock Holmes

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      #3
      Originally posted by Snowhog View Post
      Older thread, but...

      Read through this in its entirety. Not a super long thread. https://www.kubuntuforums.net/showth...l=1#post361688
      You must have been posting as I was editing LOL Both my monitor and the TV that replaced it are 1080p (1920x1080) and the size issue I am seeing is only AFTER activating the Nvidia driver. If I switch back to the Nouveau driver and reboot, I once again have a usable display.

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        #4
        Also, I feel it might be prudent to add that this is a dual-boot with Win7 (Sorry, but until I can watch my Blu-Ray discs on Linux...). Absolutely everything else (Windoze, BIOS setup, rEFInd, etc.) displays as it should.

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          #5
          It is rather immaterial that it works fine in Windows, unfortunately. They may be different screens now, but it heavily depends on how the TV reports itself, which might be doing so in a 100% standard way, as well as how much (lack of) work Nvidia puts into this functionality on its driver.

          I recently did the exact same thing with my PC, which recently had the Nvidia gtx 1050 swapped for an AMD rx 560. I was packing things away for my trip Down Under, and took down my 4K tv to pack it away. I pulled out my 1080p TV and wanted to make sure it worked before I gave it to someone. It worked, and the screen was a usable size and dpi with no fiddling at all. This is with the free driver (the proprietary one for this is actually based on the free one, and is junk for most use cases !)

          I believe part of the issue may be that Nvidia will store its setup in an xorg.conf file, or some similar one, and switching monitors does not reconfigure things as one would expect. I wonder if running nvidia-xconfig or Xorg -configure, or resetting things in the nvidia-settings program?

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            #6
            Originally posted by claydoh View Post
            It is rather immaterial that it works fine in Windows, unfortunately. They may be different screens now, but it heavily depends on how the TV reports itself, which might be doing so in a 100% standard way, as well as how much (lack of) work Nvidia puts into this functionality on its driver.

            I recently did the exact same thing with my PC, which recently had the Nvidia gtx 1050 swapped for an AMD rx 560. I was packing things away for my trip Down Under, and took down my 4K tv to pack it away. I pulled out my 1080p TV and wanted to make sure it worked before I gave it to someone. It worked, and the screen was a usable size and dpi with no fiddling at all. This is with the free driver (the proprietary one for this is actually based on the free one, and is junk for most use cases !)

            I believe part of the issue may be that Nvidia will store its setup in an xorg.conf file, or some similar one, and switching monitors does not reconfigure things as one would expect. I wonder if running nvidia-xconfig or Xorg -configure, or resetting things in the nvidia-settings program?
            Thanks for the info. I don't know much about nvidia-xconfig/nvidia-settings since I've never had a problem up until now. I travel often for my job and am heading out of town in the morning so I won't be able to report back until Friday at the earliest, but I will definitely look into your suggestion.
            Last edited by GKNByNW; Mar 22, 2019, 10:17 AM.

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              #7
              After reading the link above regarding DPI and checking out a couple articles on other sites, I did discover that for some reason the Nvidia driver was changing my DPI settings. Rather than mess around with creating a xorg.config file I went to my System Settings first and poked around. Under System Settings -> Application Appearance -> Fonts I checked the box for "Force fonts DPI" and set it back to 96.



              After a reboot my fonts and icons are back to how I would expect them to be. This seems to be not isolated to Kubuntu but other flavors of Linux as well, so if anyone else has issues like I did hopefully this will help point them in the right direction.

              The following links show how to generate a default xorg.config file as this is no longer done by default in current *buntu versions, as well as manually configuring the DPI values:

              http://www.techytalk.info/lubuntu-ch...nvidia-driver/

              https://askubuntu.com/questions/8359...-nvidia-driver

              Thanks for pointing me in the right direction, everybody B)

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