I’ve given it the old college try for a couple years, starting with openSUSE 11.1 without success. I’m up to 11.4 now with no change or relief. My openSUSE box with NVIDIA proprietary driver and the default refresh settings of 80KHz/75Hz, has an annoying beat frequency with… something, somewhere, causing an annoying ghostly flicker on my trusty 1280x1024 LCD display. I can run both openSUSE and Windows XP on this hardware and they both have the same annoying flicker at those settings. However, in Windows XP, all I have to do is select a 70Hz refresh, resulting in settings of 74.6KHz/70 Hz, and the annoying flicker is cured… for Windows only, of course. I have tried to change these settings in openSUSE to no affect. In 11.4, I find that the advice is to create modelines using CVT and edit xorg.conf, but despite rigid adherence to instructions, there’s no change. The monitor continues to see refresh settings of 80KHz/75Hz and the annoying flicker persists.
I hate to rag on openSUSE since it does so many things well, but there’s a number of adjustments I’d like to make, especially the vertical refresh, that simply won’t change, even when following documented or testamented procedures. Concentrating on the vertical refresh for now, is there anything that really works?
Try editing 50-monitor.conf so that the horizontal sync and vertical refresh entries are uncommented and trimmed to force the preferred mode
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Default Monitor"
## If your monitor doesn't support DDC you may override the
## defaults here
HorizSync 28-75
VertRefresh 50-70
## Add your mode lines here, use e.g the cvt tool
EndSection
You’ll need root privileges to do this. For example, using the nano editor from a terminal
Note that if nvidia-settings has been used to create /etc/X11/xorg.conf, any values there will take precedence over the configuration files located at /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d /
Thank you deano_ferrari (and I know who Dino Ferrari was). Like you said, the proprietary nvidia driver is indifferent to the .conf files under /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d and it is equally indifferent to changing the HorizSync and VertRefresh settings in the xorg.conf file itself. You caused me to take another look at my attempt to use a modeline created by the cvt command and it turns out that I didn’t modify xorg.conf quite right the first dozen or so times. I know I said I rigidly conformed to the instructions, but it turns out that I was rigidly conforming to a misunderstanding of the instructions. There was a time when I was pretty good at manipulating .conf files for xorg or xfree or xfree86, but the skills have grown a bit rusty. However, I have successfully modified the settings to 75KHz/70Hz and my display looks much better now.
I include my complete xorg.conf as an example of what modifications are required. I call your attention to where in the “Monitor” section I placed the modeline I created using the cvt command (just run it to see usage), and (Important!) to the “modes” directive I added in the “Screens” section.
I hope my fellow puzzled penguins will be able to find this post and use this information successfully to solve their timing issues with the proprietary nvidia driver. It may be a little retro to manipulate xorg.conf in this day and age, but it’s really not much different than what we had to do back in the day (which was really only a few years ago).
I include my complete xorg.conf as an example of what modifications are required. I call your attention to where in the “Monitor” section I placed the modeline I created using the cvt command (just run it to see usage), and (Important!) to the “modes” directive I added in the “Screens” section.
Yes, it is important for any modelines added to the ‘Monitor’ section, to be referenced in the ‘Screen’ section as you’ve described. Many users do not realise this.
I hope my fellow puzzled penguins will be able to find this post and use this information successfully to solve their timing issues with the proprietary nvidia driver. It may be a little retro to manipulate xorg.conf in this day and age, but it’s really not much different than what we had to do back in the day (which was really only a few years ago).
Auto-detection works for most, but when it doesn’t its great that the X-server can still be modified by hand if necessary. Manual overrides via xorg.conf entries largely depend on the the graphics driver concerned.