Comment 7 for bug 480159

I'm experiencing this with the NVIDIA Quadro FX 500/600 AGP (if I remember correctly), and ONLY on the DVI port--both when using a DVI monitor or a DVI to VGA adapter. Using grub2-2.02~beta2-15 on Ubuntu MATE 14.10 which by default uses a graphical theme (grub2-themes-ubuntu-mate), so I don't know if I'm experiencing a better or worse degree of slowness.

Rather than using the monitor's 1280x1024 resolution as do Linux and grub2 on other machines, it seems to fallback to 640x480 and very few colors, and unless I pass a kernel argument (e.g. vga=795) the console output is unreadable white "blocks". The drawing speed seems slightly faster on one of the machines--which I assume is due to a faster FSB (533MT/s vs 400MT/s, since they both use AGP 4x and the one that draws slower has a faster CPU clock: 2.9GHz vs 2.4GHz).

If I use GRUB_GFXMODE=1280x1024 in /etc/default/grub, it behaves much faster and in full color, just like when using the VGA port.

Fast forward to 2014, and I can find various reports of similar bugs but for quite a variety of hardware, and some of which have been resolved. I should be able to collect the output of vbeinfo if desired.