A Comparison Of AMD & NVIDIA's Linux Control Panels

The default page in the NVIDIA X Server Settings panel is the X Server Information, which displays the operating system, driver version, display name, X server version and information, NV-Control version, and the number of X screens.

For configuring the X displays, the X Server Display Configuration page shows the monitor layout and then has two tabs (display and X screen) containing various options. The layout shows the order of the displays as well as its size and whether the monitor is enabled or not. The display tab shows the monitor model, X configuration of the display, and resolution (auto or a specific resolution). Once changing the resolution, hitting the apply button will adjust the resolution in real-time. For configuring the X display, the user can select whether to put the display on a separate X screen (Xinerama-style) or using NVIDIA's TwinView. TwinView is only supported when running multiple screens on the same GPU, but not for spanning an X screen across multiple GPUs. From the X Screen tab, the screen number is shown as well as the color depth and meta-mode. The meta-modes are displayed in a drop down menu, which can be deleted and additional modes added.

For putting these display settings into a persistent state is the "Save to X Configuration File" button. Prior to saving the xorg.conf, the contents can be viewed and merging it with the existing xorg.conf file.

For each X screen there is an additional page and six sub-pages. The main page for each X screen shows the dimensions, resolution, depth, associated GPU, display name, and the number of recovered GPU errors. On the color correction page, the brightness, contrast, and gamma can be manipulated for all channels or each color channel independently. For each X screen are also the X-Video settings, which include sync to v-blank, brightness, and contrast for the video texture adapter.