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Get full boot screen resolution on 480 GTX videocards


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Hey guys,

 

I've looked through the forums for hours now but I haven't found anything useful for my complain.

 

It's the following:

 

I have a GeForce 480 GTX video card, and everything works fine.

 

But the boot screen resolution looks horrible, it's stretched and it has black borders around the screen. I want 1920x1080 startup resolution.

 

I searched for hours now, trying to find a solution, but I haven't.

 

Can anyone help me figure this out?

 

PS: I've set everything right in boot.plist and theme.plist. I read that vesa supports up to 1920 on 480gtx, idk...

 

Please help.

 

Thanks

Rob

For some reason Nvidia imposes a limitation on available VESA modes when using DVI. Usually the max you can do is 1280x1024.

 

When using the VGA output there is usually no such restriction. Unfortunately modern video cards don't have a VGA port, and even if they did I don't think anyone would want to go back to VGA display quality just to have a nice looking boot screen.

 

Use the forum search to find the thread here about VESA video mode BIOS hacking. IIRC it's somewhere in the new releases and updates sub forum.

It's not dangerous if you do it right! lol

 

Back up your original BIOS to a file first. NVFlash can do this for you.

 

If it seems scary, familiarize yourself with the process by backing up your video BIOS and then flash it back to the card.

 

If the BIOS flashing goes horribly wrong somehow (power outage..eek) the way to fix it is to install another video card. Any card will do, it can be an old PCI card for example. This will allow you to flash the original BIOS back to your nvidia card.

If you don't have another video card, you can even flash 'blind'...just don't make any typos. :huh:

 

Before flashing, make sure you are well prepared to do this in case something should happen.

 

I've flashed various Nvidia cards in my time (nvidia owner since 1998!) and never had any problems with the flashing itself and never bricked a video card.

 

Find the thread I mentioned, everything you need to know is there.

First you should visit mvktech.net and search their database for an updated BIOS for your video card.

 

This version of NVFlash works under Windows. Documentation is included. I don't remember which version it is but it is recent. I have used it to update the BIOS on my GTX 460:

NVFlash.zip

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