monitor failure.

English Hardware
1

This is regarding Machine #1 using a Samsung 27" Monitor with a 60Hz refresh rate.

Yesterday I was playing a small older 2D game through Wine. [nostalgic]
When I exited the game my monitor had changed from 1920x1080 to 1280x720.
I fixed this by going to Settings>>Display and Monitor and changing it back to 1920x1080.
Refresh rate was set to Auto.
The Samsung monitor reverted to 1920x1080 and all appeared to be fine.

Played the game again today and while I was playing the game there appeared to be a gauzy film
that crept up over the display and the task bar panel was jumping a bit.
I exited the game and because the screen was so fuzzy I rebooted.
The gauzy film started before openSuse started, while still on the Asus boot page.
I also shutdown the monitor and restarted it, but it is still the same.
I got in touch with Samsung and it appears the monitor is toast.

My questions are: Is it possible that playing that old game had anything to do with the monitor failure [because it is only 1280x720] as opposed to 1920x1080]?
I would hate to kill a brand new monitor. Is there some additional setup required to play this game at 1280x720 that I should be doing before I play?

Advice please.

2

Almost certainly you got a bum Samsung, unless you have a mechanical problem with connector or cable. 1920x1080 and 1280x720 are the primary standard HDTV modes, 1080i & 720p. I’d be very surprised to learn of any 1920x1080 display that couldn’t properly support a 1280x720 PC signal, especially if the connection was DisplayPort, DVI or HDMI (all digital) rather than VGA (analog). The following is from a 10 year old Samsung 32" “HDTV” connected via HDMI, nothing special about it:

# inxi -SGxx
System:    Host: ta790 Kernel: 4.12.14-lp151.28.36-default x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc v: 7.4.1 Desktop: KDE Plasma 5.12.8 
           tk: Qt 5.9.7 wm: kwin_x11 dm: SDDM Distro: openSUSE Leap 15.1 
Graphics:  Device-1: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] RS780D [Radeon HD 3300] vendor: Biostar Microtech Intl Corp 
           driver: radeon v: kernel bus ID: 01:05.0 chip ID: 1002:9614 
           Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.3 driver: modesetting compositor: kwin_x11 resolution: 1360x768~60Hz 
           OpenGL: renderer: AMD RS780 (DRM 2.50.0 / 4.12.14-lp151.28.36-default LLVM 7.0.1) v: 3.3 Mesa 18.3.2 compat-v: 3.0 direct render: Yes 
# xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1360 x 768, maximum 8192 x 8192
VGA-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
HDMI-1 connected primary 1360x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 160mm x 90mm
   1360x768      60.02*+
   1920x1080     59.96    60.00    59.94    59.93    30.00    24.00    29.97    23.98
   1920x1080i    60.00    59.94
   1680x1050     59.95    59.88
   1400x1050     59.98
   1600x900      59.94    59.95    59.82
   1280x1024     75.02    60.02
   1400x900      59.96    59.88
   1280x960      60.00
   1440x810      60.00    59.97
   1368x768      59.88    59.85
   1280x800      59.99    59.97    59.81    59.91
   1152x864      75.00
   1280x720      60.00    59.99    59.86    60.00    59.94    59.74
   1024x768      75.05    60.04    75.03    70.07    60.00...

That’s a list of modes, highest first, with most of the lower modes not copied here for space reasons. You can see it supports 1280x720, and at several refresh rates.

About any sort of game setup I can’t answer. My computers are tools not used as toys.

Are you sure the cable and connections are all good? Are you using a digital cable type? Do you have a different cable type you can try?

3

I agree - it also could be a not tight cable or defective cable - If you are connected HDMI try another cable first - I had a bad cable - Ironically it was an expensive one - the cheap Walmart one fixed the blurry video. If VGA see if the connectors are loose.

4

@larryr
@mrmazda

Thank you for replying.
I did check those things mentioned, but I also check the monitor while disconnected from the PC.
It is doing the same thing not connected to my PC, so I guess that confirms it to be a monitor problem.