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Missing monitor resolutions and refresh rates
Authored by: 47ronin on Jul 10, '03 12:27:50AM

Our company just received two MDD powermacs and one Sawtooth powermac. We also got three brand new ViewSonic CRT monitors (E90f+, E90f+sb, and E70f-2). All have Mac OS X 10.2.6 with all the updates. What doesn't make sense is that none of the Macs can get reasonable resolution and refresh rates, e.g. the 19" E90f+ cannot do 1600x1200 85Hz even though in OS9 we can choose it. I can only get 60Hz at that res and only 75Hz @ 1280x1024. There are no additional modes available even when "Show modes recommended by display" is unchecked. The 17" ViewSonic can only max out at 1280x1024 60Hz which is totally unacceptable.

What happened to the additional modes? In Mac OS X 10.1 there was a way to select "unsupported" resolutions. However, these resolutions are not invalid, as the Radeon 9000 cards in each of the new Macs can easily output much better modes.

We briefly tried SwitchRes X but it didn't work at all. It looked promising but nothing happened when we attempted to add extra modes. Nothing new appeared in the Display menu. There isn't even any real documentation that explains what the yellow triangles or checkboxes are for.

We tried booting with the monitors off and only turning them on when the Mac was fully logged in. Even then, when you pull down the Display menu with the monitor on, the model# appeared, as if the Mac figured out the type when the monitor powered up. There's no way to fool this accursed auto DDC!!

Macosxhints.com had a thread about editing some System display library files using information from IORegistryExplorer but the discussion became way too cryptic to be practical.

We even tried using the Detect Displays button while the monitor was powered down, then turning them back on after 15 seconds so that the Mac would be fooled into thinking there was a generic VGA installed. That failed. The Mac pulled a DDC profile as soon as the monitor was turned on.

There HAS to be a way to select valid, but greyed out resolutions! This situation is making me look bad for choosing Macintosh for our business.



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Missing monitor resolutions and refresh rates
Authored by: vikash on Oct 04, '05 12:12:58PM

The documentation for Switchres is in Readme file which is in your applications/Switchres folder. If it's not there try reinstalling the application. Also see my post in the thread below about this program's strange behaviour.

http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=34122&highlight=refresh+rate

Try creating Custom resolution it might do the trick.



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