Low screen resolution after reboot

[2026-04-03] Techassi
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Sometimes your system decides to be stuck at a super low screen resolution (usually also only on a single monitor), for example 1024 x 764. These tricks should help to resolve these kind of issues (at least they got me out of a pickle twice already).

Tips which saved my butt in the past#

  1. Make sure the correct GPU drivers are installed. For example, the NVIDIA GTX 970 graphics card only supports the nvidia-580xx-dkms drivers. The latest driver shipped by default on Arch (and possibly other distributions) is too new and will result in a low resolution after the system was updated and rebooted. Checking dmesg after the reboot helps to spot any driver-related messages/errors. So check if the currently installed driver supports your graphics card.

  2. Add nvidia_drm.modeset=1 to the boot options by appending it to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT parameter in /etc/default/grub. Then proceed to re-generate GRUB’s live boot config by executing

    grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

    This one was really hard to spot, because the switch to a low resolution was silent after a system update reboot. All utilities I ran basically reported that everything was fine. The list below mentions a few useful tools - even though they didn’t help me in this case.

  3. Try to install a newer kernel, but that could also potentially backfire. Try other potential fixes first, before resorting to this.

Generally useful tools to know in these situations#

  • nvidia-smi prints out information about the installed graphics card and driver.
  • inxi -Fzxx prints out various system-level information.
  • xrandr prints out information about monitors, their resolution and refresh rate.
  • dkms status prints out the status of kernel modules, which the driver is one of.
  • nvidia-settings launches the NVIDIA settings application, but this will display fairly limited information when you run into GPU (driver) related issues.
  • The internet and their Linux-focused forums, like the Arch forum and wiki, the Manjaro forum, or other forums for various other distributions (like Debian, Ubuntu, CachyOS, EndeavourOS).