Video resolution on one monitor has dropped from 1920x1080 to 640x480

Phydoux65 · 2021-10-16 10:26:49

Strange thing. This is not an Arch Linux only issue as I've tried booting into Debian and I get the same results. I'm thinking it's a hardware issue but I need confirmation on this.

I recently bought a new Radeon card in May from Newegg. It's been working great on my 3 monitor setup. I have 2 24" monitors and a 39" TV setup as a monitor. The other day I was running a VM on monitor 2 (one of the 24" monitors) and I was doing an install of Arch Linux on that VM. The screen did not take up the whole screen size so there was a gray box around the main screen. This happens all the time because the default screen size is not 1920x1080. Anyway, during the installation, the box around the screen started to flicker and then white lines started to form in that outer box. I finished the install but while I was doing the install I also noticed the lettering was not going away in the main screen. Sort of like it was being burned in. After the install completed I just went ahead and shut down the VM thinking that would fix the issue. Nope, I had remnants of the outer screen and the burned in stuff on my desktop. I first thought maybe it's the monitor crapping out on me.

So I disconnected the monitor and figured I'd get a new one when I got paid. Well, the other day I really needed a 3rd monitor. So I reconnected that monitor I took off and I was going to deal with the flicker and burn it... It was gone. OK, Cool.

The other day, I powered on my computer and noticed that the login screen was HUGE! (640x480) So, I logged in and noticed all three monitors were mirroring each other (at least that's what I thought).

All three monitors were set to 640x480. So I ran arandr to see if I could resolve the issue (I have an autostart.sh script for awesome Window Manager that sets my screen resolutions via xrandr but it wasn't working for some reason). With arandr, I was able to reset 2 of the 3 monitors back to 1920x1080. The other one (the 39" TV which is HDMI to HDMI from video card to TV) is stuck at 640x480. I can't change it at all.

I tried booting into Debian to see if it was an Arch problem but I had similar results. the HDMI monitor is now stuck at 640x480.

I'm now thinking this might be a video card issue.

V1del · 2021-10-16 10:36:12

This can often happen due to race conditions in bringing the card up and starting the graphical environment, try setting up early KMS: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Kernel … _KMS_start

But if one is actively stuck on that low res it might indeed be a problem of that monitor.

Last edited by V1del (2021-10-16 10:37:32)

nomorewindows · 2021-10-16 16:29:42

Or the video drivers are corrupt or missing resulting in a fail safe configuration.

Phydoux65 · 2021-10-16 23:22:27

nomorewindows wrote:

Or the video drivers are corrupt or missing resulting in a fail safe configuration.

This may be the case as I completely took off that second monitor because it was flickering and had issues with what appeared to be burn in issues. I took it off and ran it with 2 monitors without changing the xrandr statement in my startup file. Maybe that's the issue. I need to figure out how to put everything back.

Arch Linux

#1 2021-10-16 10:26:49

Video resolution on one monitor has dropped from 1920x1080 to 640x480

#2 2021-10-16 10:36:12

Re: Video resolution on one monitor has dropped from 1920x1080 to 640x480

#3 2021-10-16 16:29:42

Re: Video resolution on one monitor has dropped from 1920x1080 to 640x480

#4 2021-10-16 23:22:27

Re: Video resolution on one monitor has dropped from 1920x1080 to 640x480

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