A user may couple an external display to an electronic device using a communications path. Extended display identification data or other information on the capabilities of the external display may be provided to the electronic device over the communications path. The extended display identification data may include a list of timing elements including display parameters such as a horizontal active pixel count, a vertical active pixel count, and a pixel clock. The electronic device may tag the timing elements with their type and may flag certain timing elements as being native to the display. A scoring function may then be used to rate each timing element. A scored list of timing elements may be sorted by score. The sorted scored list may be filtered to remove inappropriate timing elements. The electronic device may automatically use a selected one of the filtered timing elements in displaying information on the external display.