Secondary monitor does not display native resolution

Question

I have a laptop (Acer Aspire 8730G) which runs a GeForce 9300M GS. Its native resolution is 1680x945 pixels. Now, I connected my monitor to it (LG E2250V-PN) with VGA (laptop only has a VGA or HDMI input but I do not own a HDMI cable) and set the lay-out to "extend". Everything works as it should, but:

My LG monitor cannot receive its native resolutions. When going to the Screen Resolutions options of Windows I can choose between these values:

NVidia control panel shows me this (running latest drivers 310.70 on Windows 8):

I know I can add a 'custom resolution' but I have no idea what to put into these fields ("Timing"):

Any tips?

Answer 1

Okay, I solved it!

Go to your NVidia Control Panel and add a Custom Resolution.

Fill in your resolution (1920 and 1080 in my case) and then under the heading "Timing" choose GTF (Generalized Timing Formula). For more information on advanced timings, see NVIDIA's website.

Answer 2

I've run into this issue and the problem was the cable. Make sure your cable supports 2k resolution and up.

Answer 3

Try to press Win+P to swap between dual monitor modes to extend your desktop. Maybe you are trying cloning both monitors. if it doesn't work, maybe your nVidia card is not detecting native resolutions of the external monitor.

Answer 4

Pressing Win+P did the trick for me. Looks like, when you connect the external monitor and have a Duplicated picture (on both screens), the video card sends the same signal to both the laptop screen and the monitor. The signal has to be in some generic resolution (1024*768 in my case) which looks unoptimal on the external screen. But when you select "External Screen Only", the videocard can tailor the signal to that monitor only and the resolution immediately becomes better. That is my interpretation of what happened to me.