nVidia Overscan Correction fixed in Latest Drivers
April 1st, 2010
My solution for fixing overscan on nvidia cards is obsolete! I did find out just a few days ago that my solution does actually work.
The person that I was originally helping with this problem decided to give Linux another shot. He tested it out and reported that it did indeed fix his overscan problems.
However… for no particular reason I decided to check out the nVidia settings control panel again. When I opened it up in Ubuntu 10.04, I noticed this (and tested it to make sure it works, which it does):
Weird, my nvidia driver, also Ubuntu 10.04, has a slider for Image Sharpening where you have Overscan Compensation. What is your driver version?
Thx
Version is 195.36.15. The card is a GeForce 9800 GT. The VBIOS version is 62.92.34.00.35. Perhaps it’s only available on specific cards?
You can try the old way and do it manually.
Yes, probably depending on type of card. Mine is a GeForce 7050PV/nForce 630a integrated on the mobo. Well, I’ll try the manual fix. Thx
Update from nvidia: “Not all GPUs can perform overscan compensation at all modes. It depends on the internal bandwidth of various parts of the GPU. It appears that your TV mode can’t be scaled on that GPU due to hardware limitations.”
Had the same problem and SAME MONITOR (Samsung Syncmaster). When I moed the syncmaster and used my Sony CRT, the overscan option disappeared!
I also had problems with overscan, the nvidia overscan compensation just didn’t work for me, all blurry and text looking bad etc…
I did a lot of searching and messing around with the xorg.conf file untill I ended up with the idea to fix this problem the same way that I fixed it in windows, using a custom EDID file.
I booted into windows to install a program called Phoenix which lets me extract AND edit the EDID information. I think it’s kind of a bad thing that a program like Phoenix doesn’t seem to excist on linux.
Anyway, after extracting and editing the EDID file, i saved it as a .raw file using the export function in phoenix.
So back in linux I copy the edid file and rename .raw to .bin and placed it in the /etc/X11/ folder.
In xorg.conf file I added a line in the screen section:
Option “CustomEDID” “DFP-1:/etc/X11/EDID.bin”
Rebooted and the overscan was GONE!
btw in my case all I had to change in Phoenix in the EDID file was the number of extensions or something similar (on the first tab on the right side of the program window), I set it to 0 and that seemed to have done the trick.
Hopefully this helps!