Bug 128100 – media-video/nvidia-kernel-1.0.8178-r3 and nvidia-glx-1.0.8178-r1 display problems

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED INVALID

[Description Stefan Tittel 2006-03-30 05:34:32 UTC]

In contrast to the 1.0.6629 driver series (which was the stable lead for AMD64 until recently), the new 1.0.8178 drivers cause two problems:

1) Fonts are displayed way too small. Please have a look at the font size of the icon labels in these screenshots:
http://www.tittel.net/bugreports/nvidia-1.0.6629-desktop.png (1.0.6629 driver) and http://www.tittel.net/bugreports/nvidia-1.0.8178-desktop.png (1.0.8178 driver).

In both screenshots the font used for the icon labels is "Sans Serif 10pt". However the actually displayed size is clearly dependend on the driver version. This is true for nearly all application (Qt as well as Gtk), with very few exceptions like Opera.


2) The Adobe Reader displays some PDF documents in the wrong aspect ratio. Please compare http://www.tittel.net/bugreports/nvidia-1.0.6629-acroread.png (the way it is displayed with the 1.0.6629 and how it is supposed to look) and http://www.tittel.net/bugreports/nvidia-1.0.8178-acroread.png (how it looks with 1.0.8178). You can also notice the difference in font size here.

I use a GeForce 6800 (AGP) graphics card and my xorg.conf is attached. The PDF file of the two latter screenshots is available at:
http://www.tittel.net/cs_talks/xml_slides.pdf

I could somehow live with the font size difference (in most applications I could just set the fonts to a bigger size), the display problem in Adobe Reader however is quite crucial to me. Thanks in advance for fixing this!

[Comment 1 Stefan Tittel 2006-03-30 05:36:33 UTC]

Created attachment 83427 [details]
my xorg.conf

[Comment 2 Miroslaw Mieszczak 2006-04-08 09:53:13 UTC]

It seems that both drivers detect size of screen in different way.
Please take a look in log of xorg, for value of detected dpi.
I think that there is difference.

[Comment 3 Stefan Tittel 2006-04-17 14:40:37 UTC]

Thank you very much, that did it!

In case anybody else should have the same problem, here is how to fix it:

1) Either measure the display area of your monitor in millimeter or just run "xdpyinfo | grep dimension" before updating the NVidia drivers to get the measure you're currently happy with.

2) Add "DisplaySize xxx yyy" to the monitor section of your xorg.conf, where xxx is the horizontal length in millimeter and yyy is the vertical length in millimeter you obtained either way in 1).

Thanks again, closing this bug...