Limited Overscan Function on Ti 4400

[Crony1]

I have a PNY Ti 4400 running on a KnoppMyth distribution with the latest Nvidia driver. My problem is that when i run nvidia-settings, my overscan choices are limited to full, or none. There's no inbetween. I've googled for hours and only came upon one other user with the same problem. Unfortunately, nobody supplied a solution. Does anyone know what the cause may be?

Thanks,
Crony

[Thunderbird]

Starting from the Geforce4MX (allmost) all cards use the builtin tvout decoder of the GPU which supports multiple modes of overscan. The Geforce4Ti is based on a older GPU design than the Geforce4MX and doesn't feature this internal decoder. On such cards and older Geforce cards an external decoder from Brooktree/Conexant/Chrontell/Philips or others is used. Not all of those chips support overscan and especially the nvidia driver doesn't support overscan on all. Likely overscan is limited on your card and be glad that you have atleast some support. Although you don't like to lose a small part of the image to get fullscreen, it is not that bad. Normally when you watch TV or a DVD it uses overscan too. A dvd player uses overscan of 7-9%.

[Crony1]

I was afraid this was going to be a hardware limitation. Thanks for the information.

[ricercar]

Originally Posted by Thunderbird

The Geforce4Ti is based on a older GPU design than the Geforce4MX and doesn't feature this internal decoder.

Bwah? Care to elaborate?

You're saying that the NV25 is based on an older design than the NV17 and that NV28 is based on an older design than the NV18? It seems more likely that NV2x was a newer design than NV1x.

[Thunderbird]

The geforce4ti was a improved geforce3 (nv20) design adding an extra vertex shader if I remember correctly. The geforce4mx (nv17/nv18) was based on a improved geforce2mx adding improved vertex support, improved 2d engine, integrated tvout, XvMC support and some more tweaks. Originally it was only meant for use in laptops but at some stage Nvidia moved back from that decision. It may sound strange but XvMC support is more advanced than on the Geforce4Ti, the same for some other 2d features.