v5.3 3D test window corrupted intermittently GeForce Go6600

[CJ]

Ive noticed that the new 3D Terrain test in v5.3 sometimes goes all Grey with fuzzy yellow bands at the top and bottom. And you can see some faint pixels update diagonally accross the window, Anyone else notice this?

Its happened on quite a few different machines. On in particular is a Laptop with a GeForce Go6600 GPU using Forceware 71.10 under XP SP2.

When you first start the 3D test, its fine for a while but goes bad say 30 minutes later.

There are no 3D errors or anything, the output window simply becomes misaligned or something and renders incorrectly.

[David (PassMark)]

This is not a known problem with our software. But it does sound a lot like typical video card problems that you get as a result of overheating (and overclocking) and bad video RAM. There are some good examples of this here.

Laptops typically had poor air flow so overheating is often an issue.

[CJ]

I dont think its a problem with the hardware at all, since its the exact same corruption on totally different machines and I can run other 3D apps fine, plus if I lock the screen and come back to the desktop, the 3D test goes good again.

I'll try to get a screen dump of the corruption next time I see it. I'm not sure if it happens on ATI GPU's but I'll look out for that too.

[David (PassMark)]

Yes a screen dump would be good.

BurnInTest probably loads the PC more than your typical game as you have the CPU, disk and graphics card all generating heat.

Can you make a careful note of specs of the machines you see this effect on. Maybe there is something in common. e.g. the video card.

[CJ]

I managed to get a screen dump of the corruption, this time it was on another machine with similar specs:

GeForce Go6600 128MB Forceware 71.18 on Windows Media Center Edition

Here's the screendump (its the exact same corruption as all the other machines):



I suspect its a Forceware compatibility issue with the 71.xx series drivers and the GeForce 6x00 GPU's.

I have yet to see it fail on an ATI GPU but I'll let you know if it happens

[David (PassMark)]

Thanks for posting the screen shot. It really is corrupted isn't it. We definitely haven't seen this before. Looks like a low level issue of the loosing sync. Reminds me of the old CRT TV sets when they lost sync. A really bad tearing of the image.

Don't know what to suggest. Maybe try falling back to older device drivers? If you have a good relationship with nVidia you could try asking them about the fault. But nVidia always ignore us when we try and contact them.

[CJ]

Yeah I suspect its just a Forceware DX9 compatibility issue.

The problem is that the machines use the Go GPU's so we only have the option of using the forcewares the machine came with, which is usually just one version and quite old.

Anyway, its not a major problem since its intermittent and doesnt produce any errors.