Why am I getting strange resolutions on the Surface Dock?

[Mastiff]

I have a Nec Multisyc monitor with a 1920x1200 resolution, which when I bought it cost an arm and a leg. Luckily they grew out again, so I now have a great monitor, plust four limbs. But with the new Surface I have a very strange problem: The monitor sees that it's getting a 2020x1204 resolution when using 1920x1200 in the graphics drivers, on a Mini Display Port to DVI. I have tried both with the drivers that came with the Surface and by forcing in the latest beta of the Intel 520 drivers (I'm so not new to messing around with drivers...). Nothing helps. Plugging the DVI to Mini Display Port doesn't do anything. By accident I found a guy named Oren Novotny (apparantly a Microsoft MVP, so he sounds important...) that tweeted about exactly the same a couple of weeks ago:

Oren Novotny on Twitter

Being utterly unsocial (no networks, no nothing - I'm an old school paranoid guy, verging on tin foil hat) I have no way of asking him on Twitter if he solved the problem, but I can't find any other tweets from him about this.

Then I plugged in an old Acer (house full of old monitors...), and that didn't really help either. This time the image was moved around four inches to the right, so the left side of the monitor was a garbled version of what should have been on the right side. Next attempt was an old BenQ, which worked. Of course the picture is really lousy, but at least it's the correct resolution!

Has anybody else seen this problem?

 

[Mastiff]

And that didn't last long. I couldn't take the crappy picture of the BenQ, so I stole my daughter's Samsung! Not much compared to my NEC, but at least a lot better than the BenQ!

 

[Mastiff]

Finally found the solution: MDP2DVIS from Startech. It's an active DP to DVI adapter, and that's what is needed to do this. 1920x1200 now works in the docking. The ports there are (somewhat stupidly) another type than the one in the unit itself, where a passive adapter worked fine, but at last it's working as it should now.

Mini DisplayPort to DVI Active Adapter

 

[GreyFox7]

So which Dock do you have? The new SP4 Dock? Something I had not considered came to my attention recently, it seems the SP4 Dock has an MST Hub. I wonder if there are any settings on monitors specific for this configuration or if it's supposed to be "Transparent".

From some of the other things I have read about MST hubs it may not be as transparent as they hoped.

Of course if you are converting from DP to some other connection type (DVI,HDMI, VGA) it just compounds the issues.

 

[commander769]

I have a similar issue, but it's more around certain applications resolution getting out of whack after docking/undocking, specifically skype for business, desktop icons and IE. For example, the skype window is sometimes way too small on the surface screen, or way too large on my monitor after I redock. I'm not sure if this is more of an app issues, or? A reboot seems to fix the issue. I have a SurfacePro4 (Win10), SurfacePro4 dock with DP to HDMI adapter (I have tried other adapters) and a Dell 23" touch-screen monitor.

 

[Mastiff]

Grey Fox 7, I have the new dock. And yes, I convert. None of my monitors have DP. But with the active mini DP to DVI there are no problems with that.

Commander769, that's because some programs can't handle the rather large difference in resolution between the Surface screen and the monitor, which probably is 1080p. There are many programs that haven't yet caught up with high res monitors. If course you'd expect Microsoft to have Skype up to scratch on that, but since they weren't even able to have a Skype that didn't crash on Windows 10 when it launched, I guess that would be too muh to ask for!