4K Output on NVIDIA 9600M GT - Success

[michaelh]

Thank you Toasty for a great tool. After countless hours/days of trying to get 4K output to work on my old Macbook Pro with Windows 10, I was able to finally get a handle on what was going on using CRU, and then just hours later figure out what to do. I will describe the problem and process I went through to help out anybody who is in the same situation with similar hardware or not.

I have a 2009 Macbook Pro with an NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT with mini DisplayPort. I installed an SSD and Windows using BootCamp and use it as my regular work computer. I just bought a UHD TV and tried to hook it up as a monitor. I do database design work and it helps to have a huge screen.

Using an AmazonBasics mini DisplayPort to HDMI and an AmazonBasics high-speed HDMI cable, I plugged it into the Samsung OneConnect box for PC/DVI. That worked fine for 1920 x 1080 output. In the NVIDIA Control Panel, I created a custom resolution for the Samsung of 3840 x 2160 @ 30Hz which I then selected in Change Resolution and voila! it worked. Or so it seemed. As soon as my main laptop screen turned off (screen saver, sleep mode, etc), I could not get it to turn on again until I unplugged the cable to the (also dark) TV. This is the problem I tried to resolve for days. The only way to get the TV to show anything and not turn the laptop screen black was to uninstall and reinstall the NVIDIA driver.

Through googling, I read a lot about EDID and tried other utilities and then made my own override with an INF file, with Native resolution of 3840 x 2160 @ 30Hz. Didn't work.

Once I had found CRU, I started to get a better understanding how the monitor profiles were managed. I deleted my override by resetting all profiles. I noticed that a profile was being created automatically for the TV with two Detailed Resolutions: 3840 x 2160 @ 30Hz and 1920 x 1080 @ 60Hz. I deleted all of the sub-HD resolutions and saved it. The 4K resolution would not show up in Windows Settings and all of the sub-HD settings would still appear. After trying this several times with small variations in the settings (60 vs 30Hz, interlaced vs non-interlaced, etc) without success, it occurred to me that Windows may not be showing the 4k resolution because the NVIDIA driver is not telling it that it can handle it. So I created a custom resolution in the NVIDIA Control Panel and took a screen shot of all of the settings. I opened CRU and modified the 4k settings of the monitor profile to match. I restarted, connected the TV, went to the Windows Settings. The resolution for the Samsung now included 3840 x 2160 (Recommended) in addition to the 1920 x 1080. None of the lower resolutions appeared any longer. Sweet success.

I don't know if I could delete the custom resolution from the NVIDIA Control Panel now and it would still work. In any case, getting the exact output settings and using CRU to modify the profile was the key to making this work.