Nvidia drivers
With the Nvidia official drivers you are able to throttle the performance of the nvidia graphic cards (gpu) to the maximum. However there are small glitches that need to be fixed manually.
After installing and enabling the nvidia proprietory drivers you would notice that the grub screen and the Ubuntu splash screen (called Plymouth) at startup and shutdown are displaying in a low resolution graphics mode. It is generally as low as 640x480 px.
The low resolution is caused because the Nvidia graphics drivers are not yet loaded at the point of grub screen and splash screen.
At that point the system can display whatever resolution the graphics card supports via the VESA BIOS extensions. 640x480 being the most viable resolution, is used hence.
The splash screen being in low resolution is not likely to cause any problems, but the grub screen should have a better resolution when you need to work at the grub console for example.
So this quick tutorial shows you how to fix the resolution at these screens. Note that this has only been tested on Ubuntu 14.04 and many other users have reported issues with this method either not working or causing a blank screens at different places.
The steps shown here can only change the resolution to a higher (supported) value, but may not provide the native resolution of your lcd monitor.
1. Fix the grub boot menu screen
To fix the grub boot menu screen edit the file /etc/default/grub
$ sudo nano /etc/default/grub
In the file look for the section that has a field named GRUB_GFXMODE declared.
# The resolution used on graphical terminal # note that you can use only modes which your graphic card supports via VBE # you can see them in real GRUB with the command `vbeinfo' #GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480
Edit it to look something like this
GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768 GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=keep
Now run the following command to regenerate the grub configuration file.
$ sudo update-grub2
Now reboot your system. The grub boot screen should have the resolution 1024x768.
Get a higher resolution
At the Grub boot screen press 'c' key to access the grub console. At the grub console run the following command
grub> vbeinfo
It will display all the supported resolutions. If you find a resolution higher than 1024x768 in the list, then you can use it as the value of GRUB_GFXMODE to get better. Make sure to select a resolution that matches the aspect ratio of the native resolution of your monitor.
2. Fix the splash screen
To fix the splash screen create and edit
$ sudo nano /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/splash
And fill it with the following line
echo FRAMEBUFFER=y
Now run the following command
$ sudo update-initramfs -u
Reboot again and now the startup and shutdown splash screens should have the resolution specified in GRUB_GFXMODE field of the grub configuration file.
Thank you very much!!!!
Thank you! I set GRUB_GFXMODE to 1360x768x32 that was listed in vbeinfo, and then sudo update-grub2, and … it worked.
Each time I increase the resolution , the screen gets laggy really laggy. If I stay on low resolution it works okay.
How do I fix it ?
That worked !! thx alot.
done alot of research but this was really quick <3
This worked perfectly for me and I have Ubuntu 18.04 with a Viewsonic 27″ LCD monitor
Hey guys,
Can some one tell me how to fix this same problem in systems without nvedia… Mine has intel integrated graphics… I followed the above methods but didn’t got any results…
Please help…
It’s only FRAMEBUFFER=y, without ‘echo’.
I followed the steps above and the screen resolution change accordingly but I get the following message at the top of the grub menu screen.
Error (hd0,msdos1)/boot/grub/themes/background.png:3:1666 missing separator after property name ‘w’
The background.png is not displayed.
any help with this problem would be appreciated.
Thanks
GRUB screen fixed. But Splash screen isn’t. At the splash screen during opening the pc, the screen stays complete black printing only a string ‘FRAMEBUFFER=y’. Can you help?
Ok, I am running Ubuntu 14.04 in a Parallels Desktop VM for OS X. just adding the line:
GRUB_GFXMODE=1280×800
and updating grub2 worked for me for both grub and the splash screen. But the login windows still is at a lower resolution. I will eventually work that out, but this is simply a pain.
God bless you!
Thank you so much! I even asked at askubuntu.com and they didn’t bring me a solution.
Really easy and helpful.
Worth noting, that you will get the following warning from the NVIDIA driver:
NVRM: Your system is not currently configured to drive a VGA console
NVRM: on the primary VGA device. The NVIDIA Linux graphics driver
NVRM: requires the use of a text-mode VGA console. Use of other console
NVRM: drivers including, but not limited to, vesafb, may result in
NVRM: corruption and stability problems, and is not supported.
So it seems that the higher resolution console is not working on purpose. (Or rather on poor support from NVIDIA…)
It only works for shutdown not for booting on or start splash. please help me :(
it does for me. ubuntu14.04 , nvidia-340.but thx anyway.
Thank you very much, i searched the whole internet for this information
Thank you very much, really helpful
just a notice, here on chrome mac a field displays:
And fill it with the following line
echo FRAMEBUFFER=y
so the line to put in /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/splash is only FRAMEBUFFER=y
It worked anyway for me (only that I would see FRAMEBUFFER=y displayed while booting) so I guess the command isn’t needed at all?!
Thanks a lot for your how-to, it works perfectly!