On Wed, Apr 08, 2015 at 01:36:57AM +0000, Brian May wrote:
On Tue, 7 Apr 2015 at 13:00 Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au> wrote:
Apparently it's a PITA to get a 4K monitor going but this is a mostly solved problem (according to an LCA2015 lecture).
What are the software/hardware requirements for a 4K monitor?
Is Debian/Jessie sufficient?
i suspect it has a lot more to do with the video driver (e.g. nouveau or radeon or proprietary nvidia etc) than it has to do with the distribution version. the distribution really only matters in that a newer distro comes with a newer default kernel - but, obviously, in most cases (assuming it compiles OK - and usually it will) there's nothing stopping you from running a newer kernel and/or video card driver on an older distro. in fact, for the nvidia-kernel-dkms driver, it's far more common to have problems compiling it against newer kernels than older ones. e.g. the versions of nvidia-kernel-dkms driver in sid and in experimental will compile without problems against linux 3.16 headers but need a tiny patch to compile against 3.19. of course, this is also complicated by the fact that sometimes a newer driver requires a newer version of X (e.g. nvidia-kernel-dkms and nvidia-glx tend to depend on the matching same version of xserver-xorg-video-nvidia)...so upgrading one may trigger a cascade of other dependant upgrades. (this is why i don't care much about the "version" of debian as I see that as being mostly irrelevant. what matters it the versions of the packages installed. saying "I'm running debian jessie" tells me nothing of much use...but saying "I have version X of package foo installed" is far more precise and far more useful)
Am guessing a video card that can display 2560x1600 may not necessarily be able to display at 4K.
However to display at 2560x1600 you usually need a dual link DVI cable. Are there are special requirements like this for 4K?
AFAIk, both DVI-D and HDMI can do "4K" resolutions (e.g. 3840x2160) but at a maximum of around 30H because of bandwidth constraints. for 3840x2160 @ 60Hz, you need DisplayPort compare the specs for displayport and dvi and hdmi for details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DisplayPort http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Visual_Interface http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hdmi (ah, interesting. HDMI 1.4 can do 4096x2160 @ 24 Hz but HDMI 2.0 can do 4096x2160 @ 60 Hz....so just as with debian, the specific version is what's important :) Anyway, this matters for gaming (because a 30Hz refresh rate is effectively an limit of 30 fps - which is about the bare bottom limit of acceptability for games like 3d rpgs and first-person-shooters etc), but probably doesn't matter much at all for normal desktop use or watching videos. craig PS: according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4K_resolution both the AOC and Kogan monitors mentioned are not, strictly speaking, "4K" as that is 4096x2160. Instead they are UHDTV or 3840x2160, close enough to actual 4K *and* a convenient 16:9 aspect ratio. -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au> BOFH excuse #378: Operators killed by year 2000 bug bite.