After installing an nVidia card into my HTPC I ran into a problem I never had before: the driver will not allow me to use the full 1280×720 resolution of my TV. After running xrandr on the console, I can confirm that Xorg reports the following supported resolutions:
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 240, current 720 x 480, maximum 1920 x 1080 default connected 720x480+0+0 0mm x 0mm 720x480 50.0* 51.0 680x384 52.0 53.0 640x480 54.0 55.0 512x384 56.0 400x300 57.0 58.0 320x240 59.0 480i/60 30.0 480p/60 60.0 720p/60 60.0 1080i/60 30.0 1080p/60 60.0
Now if you read the above closely, you can see that the display should have modes up to 1920×1080 (interlaced in my case but still). This proves that in fact the EDID information (which should allow your graphics card to auto-detect monitor properties) is coming through but that it is not working properly. Read on to solve this problem.