vid card mem needed for 1920x1080x32?

[eagl]

Hello,

Anyone have any idea how much vid memory is required to run windows at 1920x1080 at 32 bit color?  I have a new sony 1080p LCD monitor, and it works fine hooked up to my media computer that uses an nvidia 6150 video chipset, but at 1920x1080 it will only go to 16 bit color.  Also, hooking up a second monitor further drops the color depth to 8bit if the second monitor is active.

I have pushed the bios vid memory setting to 128, and windows reports that the vid card has 512 meg ram.  I thought that would be enough...?

Any ideas how to get this sucker up to 32 bit color?  The tv looks nice in 4:3 at 1280x1024 which is the highest I can set with 32 bit color and that also looks nice, but it leaves half of the screen blank.

[Fulmar]

It's a limitation of the 6150 Nvidia chipset.  At high resolutions it cannot maintain the color depth of 32 bit.  You'll need a video card (even a modest priced one) in order to support those resolutions at that depth.  The 6150 is made for web browsing and basic systems.  That's a fairly high resolution and the card doesn't have the benchmarks to pull it off at that color depth.

[eagl]

Hmmm.  Thx.  I managed to trick it into doing it for a short period of time, but it dropped the refresh rate to 24hz which sort of sucked.

I think I'll have to uninstall and reinstall the vid drivers since I disconnected the monitor on the svga port but it still reports 2 monitors.

[BaldEagl]

I'd guess any Nvidia 9600 up or equivelent ATI card should do it without problems.

[Fulmar]

I can't find any technical specs on the 6150 other than it claims "300 MHz RAMDAC Blazing-fast RAMDAC supports display with high, ergonomic refresh rates up to and including 1920x1440@75Hz."  Though it doesn't mention color depth.  I also found that "Single-Link DVI Support Able to drive flat-panel displays up to and including 1600x1200."

Of course I haven't run into the problem in a long time.  I can recall old cheap video cards (7-8 years ago at least) could support say 1280x1024 resolutions, but could only run them at 16-bit, while they could run 32-bit at 1024x768.

[eagl]

I found those specs, and that's why I think it ought to be able to do 1920x1080x32.  The resolution seemed to be partially tied to the resolution of the second monitor, but even after I unplugged the second monitor windows still shows it as being there and I can't convince it that the monitor does not exist.

I will re-install all the vid drivers and see if that helps.

[eagl]

Well, I managed to try out all the resolutions supported by the tv and 1280x768 is the largest resolution that works with 32bpp color.  I must say I'm a bit irritated that a chipset advertised to go to much higher resolutions isn't actually able to make it work.  I set 128 meg of memory in bios, and windows added an additional 384 for a total of 512 reported in windows...

[DAVENRINO]

My PC in signature is two years old now and has no problems driving a 60" display @ 1920x1080p x32 with all AH settings maxed and Hi-rez pack.  My last PC also displayed at the same settings on a 58" display using a 256MB vid card and an overclocked Barton 2500.  I think it was a 6800 GTX but not sure. 

BTW I have always also had a little 19" LCD connected in clone mode but rarely turned on.