Linux is safe and watch 4K/UHD/2160p resolution quality pictures

Posted by michel on April 25th, 2018

Recent improvements of the Linux kernel make it possible: Enjoying a full 4K/UHD/2160p resolution of 3840x2160 pixels or more even with elder hardware. Seen from the viewpoint of your CPU performance a Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Quad system will be fully sufficient to handle such a resolution at least for viewing photos and for normal office use. Many graphics cards which have never been advertised to feature 4K/UHD can be made to display such modes by overclocking your TMDS. Even a little, middle aged Intel Atom notebook can be made display 2560x1440 over its VGA connector - all of it without overclocking or any special tricks that would require one of the newer kernels. Reading this article you will enjoy higher graphics modes under Linux, soon. - and you will never wish the old 1080p called 'Full HD' back. In our opinion higher graphics modes are simply a pleasure - not just because of the smooth shape of letter and the pin-sharp display of photos. You will soon realize that there is much more text that fits on your monitor - an important issue, especially for people who program, work with large texts or who simply want to get an overview of their email inbox.

In this article we will show you how to configure a mode line manually or semi-automatically for your xorg.conf or for direct use with xrandr. Like this you may achieve to set higher modes than Full HD like 2560x1600@30. Secondly we discuss setting and overclocking the TMDS frequency of your graphics card. When you wanna achieve an UHD or 4K resolution like 2160p with elder cards it is generally necessary to adjust the TMDS speed of your card. While TMDS overclocking is supported by the mainline kernel for nouveau/Nvidia cards with the nouveau.hdmimhz kernel parameter you need to compile the kernel yourself with our new patch if you wanna overclock a radeon/ATI card. Currently Mageia is the only distribution which ships with the radeon.hdmimhz patch out of the box. Do not panic if you have never compiled the Linux kernel. We will show you how to do it. We will present a table of NVIDIA chipset and hdmimhz combinations for nouveau. Finally we conclude with some hints on how to adjust the icon and font size for your graphical shell most easily.