How can I set display refresh rate with Xorg?

altiris · 2015-02-21 01:55:03

Since my desktop environment of choice (Cinnamon) does not have an option to select the display's refresh rate, I would like to do it in Xorg or another utility that will apply it everytime on boot. I have looked here on the wiki https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/xo … conf_files and the solution seems to be with creating "/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-monitor.conf" however I have tried this and my refresh rate still defaults to 60 on boot, instead of the 119.98 that I specified in the 10-monitor.conf file. What am I doing wrong here?

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier             "Monitor0"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier             "Device0"
    Driver                 "radeon" #Choose the driver used for this monitor
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier             "Screen0"  #Collapse Monitor and Device section to Screen section
    Device                 "Device0"
    Monitor                "Monitor0"
    DefaultDepth           24	       #Choose the depth (16||24)
    SubSection             "Display"
        Depth              16
        Modes              "1920x1080_119.98" #Choose the resolution
    EndSubSection
EndSection

If I am supposed to be re-naming Monitor0 or Device0 to my actual devices, how do I find the appropriate names for them?

Last edited by altiris (2015-02-21 01:58:52)

Knute · 2015-02-21 05:48:16

The Monitor0 and Device0 can be anything you want. They are used in the Server section of xorg.conf so that you could set up multimonitor setups among other things.
As for the refresh rate, your radeon driver may have those options. I'm not sure if there is an application to set those things, as I have used nvidia cards for a long time and don't know the radeon tools. Sorry.
If you put in the specs for your monitor (Horiz and Vert Refresh rates) those options may appear, as those refresh rates are used to calculate resolution and refresh.
Now that I think about it, have you taken a look at xrandr? It's for video modes. I haven't played with it much, but it is well documented.

HTH

altiris · 2015-02-21 14:17:02

Knute wrote:

The Monitor0 and Device0 can be anything you want. They are used in the Server section of xorg.conf so that you could set up multimonitor setups among other things.
As for the refresh rate, your radeon driver may have those options. I'm not sure if there is an application to set those things, as I have used nvidia cards for a long time and don't know the radeon tools. Sorry.
If you put in the specs for your monitor (Horiz and Vert Refresh rates) those options may appear, as those refresh rates are used to calculate resolution and refresh.
Now that I think about it, have you taken a look at xrandr? It's for video modes. I haven't played with it much, but it is well documented.
HTH

Ahh I see, so I can just put whatever I want that, might as well rename it to something related to my monitor. The radeon driver does support my refresh rate, to an extent, 144Hz causes flickering/artifacting but 120Hz works fine and so I will be using that (I reported the bug already about 144Hz and a patch has already been made, should be available sometime or can be available now if you apply a kernel patch, the bug report is here incase anyone is interested https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=87796 Comments 19 and 20 have the patch attached and Comment 17 has details on how to apply the patch when compiling your kernel, I tried it and got an error when compiling though) I have been using lxrandar for the time being and that works alright, there is even a "save" button but everytime I reboot the machine it reverts back to 60Hz. I read online someone putting xrandr in .xinitrc so I will try that and report back.

EDIT:I can't seem to get this whole Xorg 10-monitor.conf working, I have tried setting my Modeline in Section "Monitor" I have tried listing the Vertical refresh rate and horizontal sync, and nothing. Ill try a bit more...
EDIT2: alright so here is my method to fix this, sort of hacky as if you do this on a computer that has more than one user you need to add this file to all user's directories.
So I tried using xrandr and setting the refresh rate and whenever I did that the monitor came out with weird lines around windows....I don't know what I did wrong. Instead, use the program called lxrandr and open it up and set the res. and refresh rate to what you want. Lxrandr saves the file here ~/.config/autostart/lxrandr-autostart.desktop so use gedit or nano or whatever to open that up and copy the part that starts with xrandr in the Exec= line and copy that into a file in a users home directory. Something like .refresh_rate is good (make it executable and put it on startup) An example for me is "xrandr --output DVI-0 --mode 1920x1080 --rate 119.98" without the "" of course.
EDIT3: I am not marking this as solved because it isn't solved yet. I would still like to get this done through Xorg so its applied system wide.

Last edited by altiris (2015-02-21 15:21:23)

Latman · 2023-12-16 00:31:03

I set my refresh rate to 144Hz with my Radeon RX6600XT and I'm getting similar flickering and artifacting still. Is there any solution to this by only using xorg?

seth · 2023-12-16 08:49:15

Use 120Hz?

Please don't necrobump, chances are that your situation is completely unrelated to what was going on 9 years ago.
Open a new thread and start that by posting your xorg log, https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xorg#General

V1del · 2023-12-16 20:05:07

Closing this old topic.

Arch Linux

#1 2015-02-21 01:55:03

How can I set display refresh rate with Xorg?

#2 2015-02-21 05:48:16

Re: How can I set display refresh rate with Xorg?

#3 2015-02-21 14:17:02

Re: How can I set display refresh rate with Xorg?

#4 2023-12-16 00:31:03

Re: How can I set display refresh rate with Xorg?

#5 2023-12-16 08:49:15

Re: How can I set display refresh rate with Xorg?

#6 2023-12-16 20:05:07

Re: How can I set display refresh rate with Xorg?

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