This has been discussed on the Nouveau mailing list. When running this command: xrandr -s 640x480 Nouveau only fills the screen horizontally, vertically it leaves 2/3s of the screen at the top and bottom unused. This makes this mode unusable. Adding -r 75 to the above command fixes the problem. Perhaps the higher frequency mode should be used by default. The NVIDIA drivers do not have this problem, the screen is always filled. This bug breaks games like "lbrickbuster2" which want to run full screen at 640x480.
Created attachment 143385 [details] monitor edid Nouveau doesn't pick these things -- it does what it's told. It does, however, allow it. Sounds like something about the monitor should make that illegal, but it's unclear what that would be. Attaching EDID sent via ML. The interesting bits decode as Established timings supported: 720x400@70Hz 9:5 HorFreq: 31469 Hz Clock: 28.320 MHz 640x480@60Hz 4:3 HorFreq: 31469 Hz Clock: 25.175 MHz 640x480@75Hz 4:3 HorFreq: 37500 Hz Clock: 31.500 MHz 800x600@60Hz 4:3 HorFreq: 37900 Hz Clock: 40.000 MHz 800x600@75Hz 4:3 HorFreq: 46900 Hz Clock: 49.500 MHz 1024x768@60Hz 4:3 HorFreq: 48400 Hz Clock: 65.000 MHz 1024x768@75Hz 4:3 HorFreq: 60000 Hz Clock: 78.750 MHz 1280x1024@75Hz 5:4 HorFreq: 80000 Hz Clock: 135.000 MHz Standard timings supported: 1920x1080@60Hz 16:9 1600x1200@60Hz 4:3 HorFreq: 75000 Hz Clock: 162.000 MHz 1280x1024@60Hz 5:4 HorFreq: 64000 Hz Clock: 108.000 MHz 1280x800@60Hz 16:10 1152x864@75Hz 4:3 HorFreq: 67500 Hz Clock: 108.000 MHz CTA extension block Extension version: 3 25 bytes of CTA data Video data block ... VIC 3 720x480@60Hz 16:9 HorFreq: 31469 Hz Clock: 27.000 MHz VIC 2 720x480@60Hz 4:3 HorFreq: 31469 Hz Clock: 27.000 MHz VIC 1 640x480@60Hz 4:3 HorFreq: 31469 Hz Clock: 25.175 MHz So it certainly seems like 640x480@60 should work OK.
Changing status to resolved. I reinstalled the NVIDIA drivers, did an lsmod and noticed module "nvidia_modeset" running. I think that explains why I get different behavior with and without nouveau.
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