Running Headless: How to Force Display Rez?

[Paul]

Per (PeteCresswell):

This is starting to beg a question for me: Once I remove or turn
off that Radeon driver, what is it that's left and is supplying
whatever it takes to get me a screen image?

Maybe that's what I need to try to hack in order to move from
1600x1200 to 1920x1200.

FWIW, this is not a religious issue. As someone already observed
I can live with 16x12 just fine. It's more the idea than
anything else.

I've referred to this in the past, as the "VESA driver", in the
sense that it only supported a few VESA-like resolutions (800x600
or 640x480). Examples would be, the tiny cramped screen you used
to get in Safe Mode. In Safe Mode, it's possible to not have the
regular (Radeon) driver loaded. And the system needs a fallback
that can at least talk to a frame buffer. As far as I know, there's
some feature of the BIOS (video card BIOS chip loads and registers
VESA resolutions), and a VESA driver might be tapping into the
modes there.

So the question would be, whether it's still the same emergency
driver concept, as it's doing 1600x1200 for you, and that's way
above what would normally be supported.

On my Windows 8 install, on the machine with an FX5200, the screen
runs at 1024x768 (with a 1440x900 monitor), because Windows 8
claims to not have an official driver for the FX5200. So I'm
not being offered anything near 1600x1200 in that scenario.
VESA resolutions are more likely to be 4:3 or 5:4, and
things like 16:10 or 16:9 are more modern concepts. So the
emergency driver might not necessarily support all of those
kinds of options.

You could try using Device Manager, and display the driver
file details of what is currently being used. Maybe that
will hint at what emergency driver type it is. (Emergency
driver being the thing installed, when "Radeon" is missing.)

Paul

 

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

I don't know what the basis of that might be, but Nirsoft has been
around for ages and have proven themselves to be completely
trustworthy.

+1