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I have a Mini-PC with an ASRock AD2700B-ITX motherboard, which has an Intel PowerVR SGX545 on-board graphic chip. I installed Ubuntu 12.04 on it today.

Everything is working properly and is quite quick and responsive, except that the video resolution is too low. I cannot set it higher than 1280x1024. I have a BenQ G2220HD display, which is capable of 1920x1080.

Since both the graphics chip and the display are capable of higher resolutions, I assume this is a driver problem?

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can you confirm this is not supported natively by ubuntu? I was gonna get this chip too. also this the graphic card should be SGX545. NOT SGX454 as you mentioned above! –  c2h2 May 16 '12 at 16:25
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2 Answers

I think the answer you got in your forum post is correct: if X.org doesn't have a chipset-specific driver, it's going to fall back to the generic VESA driver, which may not support all of the functions of that graphics chip.

I looked in the manual for that motherboard, and it is very sketchy on graphics issues. It claims "up to 1920x1200" but doesn't justify that with a video memory spec. Given the nature of the Atom and PowerVR, I'd bet it's taking a slice of system RAM for a video buffer, but I don't see anything in the UEFI section of the manual on configuring its size.

You could try forcing X to recognize the video RAM. Say sudo nano /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-vesahack and put this in the newly created file:

Section "Device"
    Identifier "Screen0"
    VideoRam 9000

This tells X that there is 9 MB of video RAM, enough for 1920x1200 at 4 bytes per pixel. If X won't restart when you do that, try changing it to 6750 kB, for 3 Bpp. I don't hold out much hope that this will work, but it's a thing to try. If it doesn't help, remove 99-vesahack.

Your best option may be to install a graphics card known to have good X.org support.

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I have that same motherboard / OS setup and I'm using the cedarview drivers. I achieve full resolution but performance in 2D isn't brilliant.


Seems that the manufacturer doesn't really care much about releasing Linux drivers for this chipset, it is a shame, it is a good-ish machine.

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