How to use display port with nvidia and 4K monitor

[tarazed]

This is a bit technical and not specifically Mageia related.

I have a Dino PC with Gigabyte Sniper Z97 motherboard and a GTX 770 graphics card. Up until now the monitor has been connected via the DVI port but my new Dell 4K monitor has a Display Port connector only (it looks like a modified HDMI socket on the PC). On boot the Gigabyte BIOS logo did not appear but some initial Mageia text was displayed and overlayed with the UEFI boot screen. From there it booted into mga5_rc OK but the display driver seems to have switched to the onboard Intel graphics. There is no GLX. The nvidia-settings utility says that display :0 does not appear to be using an nvidia adapter.

I tried a Dell 3K monitor after that, with the usual DVI connector and everything went as normal so the BIOS settings were visible. The Initial display output option has four choices:

Code: Select all

IGFX         Onboard Intel 810 graphics
PCIe 1 slot  Default, presumably GTX 770
PCIe 2 slot  ?
PCI          ?


Although I never change the default it looks like onboard graphics are chosen but not for the POST. F2 is ignored. After boot the full 4K resolution is available but not GLX. There are two device sections in the xorg.conf file, one for nvidia and one for Intel, both naming nvidia as the driver.

My guess is that the nvidia card knows nothing about the display port. If that is the case is there some way to configure the card to recognize it, bearing in mind that with the 4K monitor attached the Intel 810 will be in control and with the 3K monitor there will be nothing attached to the display port?

[doktor5000]

Did you create the xorg.conf yourself? Please attach it here.

[tarazed]

Yes and no; I ran nvidia-xconfig when instructed. Uploading attachment; cut and paste always craps out on me - something to do with button 2 being a scroll wheel I think.

xorg.conf

(3.12 KiB) Downloaded 195 times

[tarazed]

Sorry, I should have said I am now running with a 3K monitor on a DVI port. There is no problem with that. I have overwitten my copy of the old xorg.conf and it will take a while to reconnect and reboot. Will send the relevant xorg.conf when done.

[tarazed]

Well I tried to get the new monitor working with Mageia but could not get it to do even what it was doing yesterday. The old config had "nvidia" marked as the driver in both device sections and that at least allowed the system to boot without GLX support. Just now I tried removing the 3K monitor and running the 4K drom the display port and got nowhere. I tried successive reboots and switched to a console once "Reached target graphical interface" was reached and launched XFdrake. Neither vesa nor nv worked. I suspect that the problem there was the native resolution - quite out of reach. Had to give up and revert to 3K and DVI. On first boot the sceen displayed at a very low resolution so I had to invoke XFdrake to switch back to the proprietary graphics driver.

The real problem probably lies in the BIOS, not being able to deal with DP connections properly. That seems to follow from the lack of BIOS access on DP. AFAIK the latest nvidia drivers support Display Port. There is a later version of the BIOS firmware which can be installed via Q-Flash from a USB drive (No Windows anywhere around here) but there are dire warnings about not flashing the BIOS unless you absolutely have to and I have no idea if reflashing would solve the problem. So, all I am left with is £600-worth of hi-tech junk.