PC-BSD and 4K — Oh my!

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Kris Moore

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I had recently seen some chatter on IRC about 4K monitor support. One of the people discussing stated that PC-BSD didn’t support 4K monitors, which was curious to me, since I hadn’t tried it yet. This week I did something about that, and ended up getting two 4K monitors and a new video card (With triple DisplayPort) to do some testing.

The Hardware

2x — ASUS PB287Q 28-Inch Screen LED-Lit 4K Monitor (Amazon)

Zotac GeForce GTX 960 2GB GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 HDMI DVI DisplayPort (Amazon)

The Setup

The setup process was thus:

1. Remove the old monitors and video card

2. Connect the new monitors and video card

3. Go into monitor menus — Enable DisplayPort 1.2 mode

4. Boot up, selecting the “Run Display Wizard” option at the boot-loader.

5. Click “Accept”

That’s it! The display wizard properly detected both 4k monitors, and set them up in a proper dual-head configuration. Logging into KDE resulted in it detecting the new monitors, and automatically re-configuring the display to take advantage of the new resolution. At this point the system was fully usable, font-scaling even worked properly for Firefox and such.

Having 4K setup I did find a few minor issues, which are already being fixed in time for PC-BSD 10.1.2 next week, such as changing the mouse cursor to something which supports larger sizes / resolutions better. The only real hiccup was figuring out that the monitor ships with DisplayPort set to 1.1 mode, only giving 30hz mode out of box. Changing that in the monitors menus to DisplayPort 1.2 mode, enabled 60hz, giving a silky-smooth desktop experience at 4K resolutions. Not sure if that is something typical of all 4K monitors, or just this model in particular, but if you can’t go beyond 30hz, you may want to check that in your monitor documentation.

Anyway, I hope this information is of use to anybody else who is thinking of taking the 4K plunge. Of course I would love additional feedback from other users who are running 4K, to see if there are other tweaks we can make for optimal support out of box. Let us know on the bug tracker, mailing lists or new forums!

fXECWE4M46Y


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