Hiya,

I've been messing around with various resolutions and settings for the ps3fb video driver using the ps3videomode and kernel boot arguments and I've turned up a number of problems.

720p is scaled down for some strange reason that I can't figure out, leaving black borders around the edge of the display. The scaling slows the entire machine down as it fills the PS3's busses with scaling operations, making video playback jerky and unpredictable.

Worse - the scaling causes screen artifacts that show up as horrible pixellation of any video played.
I think this is why the ps3fb driver supports a dithering mode, an attempt to make video look better in the scaled 720p mode. Of course the dithering causes more operations on the frame buffer - slowing things down even more.

720p with the "-f" fullscreen flag does not scale the image, so it gives a much better picture. It also improves the speed of the whole system, as it's not spending it's time scaling a 1280x720 image. Unfortunately it causes the edges of the screen to be overscanned off the edge of the panel - almost as anoying as the scaling was.

Ideally an improved ps3fb driver would provide a native 1366x768 res without scaling or the silly overscan problem.
The question is - how much of the ps3fb driver's functionality comes from the open-source driver itself?
If it's just a wrapper to a bunch of hypervisor calls, then there's little hope for fixing it, as only Sony control the hypervisor (unless someone engineers an exploit).

If the open-source part of the driver is genuinely capable of controlling video output modes, then we have hope of a fix coming from the linux community, but somehow I doubt that Sony left that much control available.