Cannot change "Active Signal Resolution"

Question

I have a (First 301 GD Live) monitor with a 2560x1600 native resolution that intermittently fails to identify itself properly to windows. I have just moved to a new office and when trying to get started again the monitor is just not being recognized. Windows just says it's a "DVI" monitor. Windows now shows that the "recommended" resolution is 1280x800. If I go to advanced display settings and list all modes and then select 2560x1600/60Hz then the "desktop resolution" becomes 2560x1600 but the Active Signal Resolution remains at 1280x800 and the picture is horrid - like an upscaled low resolution image.

I tried setting the resolution via the NVIDIA Control Panel to 2560x1600 but the Active Signal Resolution remains at 1280x800 and so the picture is still awful.

I also tried power cycling the monitor itself several times to no avail (this had helped in the past).

My graphics card is a GeForce GTX 1650 Super.

Is it possible to instruct the graphics card to send out a 2560x1600 signal that you specify, regardless of whatever monitor the computer thinks is at the other end of the cable?

Solution

Windows expects a monitor to communicate its Extended Display Identification Data (EDID) in the process that is called Auto Detection. The EDID contains all that Windows knows about the monitor, and this information dictates how the display driver works with that monitor.

Your monitor seems to report a wrong or corrupted EDID.

There are usually two solutions to such a problem:

• Update the firmware of the monitor with the latest version (I have not been able to locate one for your monitor)
• Set manually the monitor's EDID for Windows as constant, so Windows will not try to contact the monitor.

If one has an NVIDIA Quatro display card, this can be done via the NVIDIA control panel, using the "system topology" section. But this does not seem to be implemented for the GeForce line of monitors.

The other option is to use a utility that creates a custom EDID profile, to set up a permanent profile in Windows so it does not contact the monitor.

Below are a couple of utilities. They are pretty old, but have been reported as working for many years and up to very recently. I truly don't know how well they work in the latest versions of Windows 10.

• Custom Resolution Utility (open-source)
• PowerStrip (discontinued) was once the best of its kind

More recent software which might help:

• ControlMyMonitor - one of the excellent Nirsoft utilities

Useful reference : Understanding EDID.

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Microsoft has an article about how to override the monitor's EDID through a crafted .inf file (which I never tried): Overriding Monitor EDIDs with an INF.