[SOLVED] Will a 10 year old gtx9800 card run an ultrawide monitor?

Jan 10, 2023
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NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX card.
I want an Ultrawide monitor min 2560x1080 to see all my tracks in Ableton. Do I have to upgrade the card? I can't seem to find supported resolutions for that card. I would hate to buy one and it not work. I am not wanting to upgrade the graphics card if not needed. Thanks for any info.

Computer:
windows 7
Tyan s7010 MB
2x Xeon 5690
96 gb ram
only for music production (no internet)
 
Solution
This is a more complicated question than you'd expect, because the GTX 9800 does support two 2560x1600 panels, so should run two 2560x1080 monitors fine.

The caveat is the monitors must be dual-link DVI. Using adapters to HDMI does not work because that is single-link, which is only good enough for 1920x1200, and insufficient for 2560x1080 unless you overclocked the TDMS clock to 184MHz (a HDMI monitor should handle that fine but the question is can you do this on the card) or dropped to 30Hz refresh rate.

The analog VGA out is good to 2048x1536 @85Hz so technically has enough bandwidth for 2560x1080 but whether this can be done or will be a blurry mess is the question, as vintage nVidia generally had the worst analog image...
This is a more complicated question than you'd expect, because the GTX 9800 does support two 2560x1600 panels, so should run two 2560x1080 monitors fine.

The caveat is the monitors must be dual-link DVI. Using adapters to HDMI does not work because that is single-link, which is only good enough for 1920x1200, and insufficient for 2560x1080 unless you overclocked the TDMS clock to 184MHz (a HDMI monitor should handle that fine but the question is can you do this on the card) or dropped to 30Hz refresh rate.

The analog VGA out is good to 2048x1536 @85Hz so technically has enough bandwidth for 2560x1080 but whether this can be done or will be a blurry mess is the question, as vintage nVidia generally had the worst analog image quality of the three GPU manufacturers back then.

I should point out that driver support for Tesla ended back in 2015 so if Ableton doesn't render correctly on it, that will never be fixed. But as the days of crazy prices for old GPUs is over, you could get a GTX 960 for $60 or 750Ti for $50 again, both of which still get current Win10 drivers (though Win 7 support ended two years ago).
 
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Solution
Jan 10, 2023
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my card has VGA, DVI, and HDMI outputs. Windows 7 can only do 2 at a time. Are you saying that I can only get this resolution if I use two DVI outputs? or can I get it with my DVI output but not out of the HDMI with and adaptor for dual ultrawide setup? Maybe I will just hook it up to my 4k tv and see what happens - no DVI input on it so I think you are saying it wont go even full 4k . I live in NZ so things are more expensive, I should probably just save all money for a new system, not these upgrades I have been doing (new processors and ram set me back $350, with not much of an improvement in track count. I cant even install windows 10 with my cpus!
 
You can connect one 2560x1080 monitor to the DVI port but you must use one dual-link certified DVI cable to do so. If you have a 2nd 2560x1080 monitor you could try the VGA.

If the HDMI port is v1.2 that's 165MHz just like single-link DVI so has the same max limit of 1920x1080. Therefore you could connect a 2nd monitor to the HDMI but it'll only be1080p, and if that's not the native resolution it'll look terrible. But if the HDMI is 1.3 then at 340Hz it can run up to 2560x1600 just like dual-link DVI. HDMI 1.4 used from Fermi up to 1st gen Maxwell like the 750Ti could only run at 4k30 officially in the spec, but the drivers were updated to run 4k60 at lower color precision 4:2:0 chroma subsampling.

The ability to only drive two displays at a time is due to your GTX 9800 and not any limitation of Windows 7.