I have a ViewSonic VP2365WB monitor which claims to support 1360x768 resolution: ViewSonic VP2365WB user guide, see page 16
I have a AMD HD7750 based video adapter ASUS HD7750-1GD5
I need to set my monitor to 1360x768 resolution, but I cannot get acceptable image quality - I can get good sharpness or accurate colors, but not both. Here is what I have tried:
the monitor is connected to DVI port. If I set 1360x768, everything is too blurry. If I look in the information menu (OSD) on the monitor itself, it reports that it has 1400x1050 resolution. When I go to GPU scaling settings, I see that Catalyst has GPU scaling enabled and I cannot disable it. If I remove the tickmark and hit Apply, the checkbox gets ticked back again. For some reason Catalyst enforces GPU scaling even if the monitor itself is capable of handling 1360x768. So, now we have two stages of scaling going on - the GPU scales form 1360x768 to 1400x1050 and then the monitor scales 1400x1050 to its native 1920x1080.
the monitor is connected to VGA. At first everything looks the same, but this time I see an option in Catalyst to ignore EDID. When I uncheck it, my monitor is recognized by Windows as "Generic Non-PNP Monitor" and the image gets sharp and the monitor itself reports being in 1360x768, as expected. No more GPU scaling. The monitor itself is clearly capable of much better scaling to 1360x768 than the GPU.
I could live with VGA mode, but then colors look somewhat strange, especially subtle tones are washed out and I cannot fix that with any color settings on the monitor or Catalyst. On DVI the colors are much better.
I really would want to get my monitor to work at 1360x768 resolution on DVI, but I cannot, because Catalyst for some reason thinks that this resolution is not supported and turns on GPU scaling which looks blurry. But maybe 1360x768 isn't supported on DVI by the monitor or the video adapter? I can't think of any reasons, why. The monitor user guide does not say if some resolutions are VGA only (and only without EDID).
I guess, it might work if I find an option to disable EDID for DVI, but there is no such option in Catalyst. Also it might work if I can set GPU scaling to scale directly from 1360x768 to the native 1920x1080 thus avoiding scaling twice (GPU+monitor), but I don't see such and option. The GPU seems to pick the closest resolution reported by the monitor and then scales the desktop to it.
I have Windows 7 Pro x64 and I have the latest Viewsonic monitor drivers (which are pretty old, year 2009, but there are no other options) and the latest Catalyst drivers.
UPDATE:
Somehow after multiple restarts and driver reinstalls GPU scaling on DVI started to work as expected - scaling 1360x768 to native 1920x1080 instead of previous blurry 1400x1050. Anyway, it seems that the monitor itself does not support 1360x768 on DVI or maybe the video adapter does not support it because there is no way to set exactly 1360x768 on DVI. But now GPU scaling works much better and I'm satisfied.
The long story:
I suspect many would ask why do I need 1360x768 on a 23" monitor. I have visual impairments since birth but I have been working as a programmer for years. The only thing I need is to have a larger monitor and set the resolution to be lower than native. I know that non-native resolutions make image less sharp, but for me everything is somewhat blurred anyway, so a tiny additional blurring does not make any difference (except if it is GPU scaling which looks really bad). I have tested multiple different resolutions on this monitor and I find 1360x768 to have the most appropriate text and UI element sizes to my eyes. I know that I can change text size (DPI) in display settings, but there are lots of programs which ignore this setting and UI looks ugly or corrupted. I could replace my monitor to something else, but I really like the uniformity of colors and background lighting on it. I have tried to work on Asus PA238Q, but white pages on it looked too cloudy and dirty and uncomfortable to my eyes, so I decided to keep VP2365WB. There is just this 1360x768 on DVI problem which I'd like to solve to be completely happy with this old but still good IPS monitor.