After High Sierra Install Can Not Control Display Resolutions...

[RadMatty]

...And Other Display Options.

My motherboard is very old, but it has been running Sierra flawlessly. Since the installation of hi Sierra, I have been stuck with a single monitor resolution of 1024 x 768. Of all the things I've looked at for possible solutions, a file, that I got the computer to generate, called preboot.log seems the most interesting. It seems to indicate that, in the pre-boot stage, the computer is looking for a display with a resolution of 1920 x 1080, but cannot find it and goes looking for the next best mode which it finds to be 1024x768.

0:417 0:094 === [ InitScreen ] ========================================
0:417 0:000 SetScreenResolution: 1920x1080 - not found!
0:417 0:000 SetMaxResolution: found best mode 2: 1024x768
0:417 0:000 - already set
​

Part of this makes sense because the maximum resolution of the display that I'm using it is 1680 x 1050, but I don't understand why the pre-boot routine does not find that and set it is the maximum resolution. Additionally, I don't understand why can't select a different resolution once the computer is booted up and running.

Everything else about high Sierra seems to be working well with my hardware. It is stable and all the other functions including audio seem to be working well.


Another helpful fact might be that I had a lot of difficulty getting my new installation to boot with Clover. At first the only way I could get it to boot was to use the unibeast installation drive. I finally succeeded in getting it to boot by itself by deleting the contents of the EFI partition and replacing them with those of the unibeast installer. I'm pretty sure that the instruction set from the installer is pretty stripped-down, e.g., the single Display resolution and lack of other display controls.

I think I need now is some guidance relative to installing the correct instructions for enabling the full feature set of my display.

Maybe all I need is to learn where the file or files with the pre-boot instructions it Is located.



This is what the System preferences panel should look like:

And this is what it looks like now:

 

[RadMatty]

Here's a shot from the "About This Mac/System Report" feature of the Mac OS where you can see that my High Sierra install does not recognize the display. And below that is a screenshot shot of the same screen running Sierra where at does recognize the display.

Notice, there is an extra line in the description of the graphics card running Sierra that says "Metal: supported". I don't know if that makes any difference but it's something that I spotted and have it underlined in red.

The same thing happens when the computer is running the HD 3000 graphics instead of the Nvidia GPU
.
.
.

 

[RadMatty]

Under System Preferences/Displays I can see my old Nvidia GTS 450 graphics card properly identified, but the display shows up as generic/no name with a single resolution of 1024x768. It works, but it has poor quality and a single resolution.

If I run the monitor with the HD3000 motherboard graphics I get the same results.

The monitor is an Acer X223W that is probably 8 years old. It all ran fine under Sierra.

What's it going to take to get the display working again?

 

[RadMatty]

Well, I made some progress with this. I studied the config.plist files for my working installation of Sierra and my new installation of High Sierra. I put the two config.plist files into TextWrangler so that I could do a speedy comparison between the two. I saw some things right away that looked like they were blocking my Nvidia card from functioning properly. I didn't know exactly what to do, so I searched Google found a relevant forum thread, that was very helpful. Armed with that new information I did some edits on config.plist using Clover Configurator. And lo and behold, I can now boot my system with my Nvidia GPU and my monitor recognized by High Sierra and achieving the proper resolution. The the only problem now is that the Display flickers and flashes in a quite unstable and disturbing way.

I know there are other people running High Sierra on this motherboard, So I'll just keep trying