Graphics corruption with Nvidia cards and 10.6.7+

[VirtualRain]

I'm getting strange graphics corruption occasionally on one or both of my monitors where the graphics get all corrupted. I wish I could take a screen capture but every time I do, the capture comes out perfect despite the graphics/windows/text being jumbled in a blocky mess. (Updated with a photo of the screen)

This only started happening after I updated to 10.6.7. If I reboot I might be fine for 10 minutes or an hour but it eventually comes back and almost certainly if I play multiple videos (eg. 2 or more) in Quicktime on the same monitor at once.

My GPU config consists of...
2x Nvidia GT120 each driving a single 24" LCD ACD via MDP

In googling this issue, I found out there is a known issue with Nvidia drivers with 10.6.7 not supporting Quadro cards...

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3740?viewlocale=en_US

That's not my problem, but it is Nvidia driver related, indicating they changed the drivers in 10.6.7. Other's with 320M are complaining of slightly different issues...

http://discussions.info.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=13312005

I'm wondering if anyone here with Nvidia cards and 10.6.7 has noticed anything?

UPDATE: I took a chance and installed the NVIDIA drivers mentioned in the Apple KB article here. After some very preliminary testing, I can't seem to recreate the problem. 😕 If this ends up fixing this problem and this is not unique to me I'll be pretty disappointed with Apple's QA process.

 

[VirtualRain]

So I gather no one else has encountered this? Odd.

 

[Whaditis]

So I gather no one else has encountered this? Odd.

I just encountered the same thing last night. I am using 2x GT120 cards using 3 monitors and had to reboot a couple of times.

I have a suspicion that it is flash that's doing this as I was playing a youtube video on one screen while browsing on the other two screens.

Once I rebooted the second time and didn't use youtube it did not come back.

 

[Transporteur]

Oh boy! I am so done with graphics cards and Apple. Only trouble. Is there any quality control whatsoever with their software updates? 😡

Why do we pay the premium for Apple graphics cards?

I do have a GT120 in my system as well, but considering these news, I'm definitely not trying 6.7. Still running 6.3 here cause that's the last version that runs my system.

/rant

 

[VirtualRain]

The good news is that I haven't had any issues after two evenings now since I installed the new Nvidia drivers.

 

[666sheep]

Thanks for this thread VR 🙂
I've installed these new drivers on my Mini with 320M and its OGL performance increased by about 20% (in comparison to 10.6.7 ones). Installer doesn't want to run, because it's checking model ID, but I've used Pacifist and kextHelper, et voila 🙂 Still it's worse than in 10.6.3, though, but I can live with that.
10.6.7 drivers are completely screwed-up.

Still running 6.3 here cause that's the last version that runs my system.

I didn't want to downgrade OS, so I've done some kext fiddling. Unfortunately seems to be impossible to use 10.6.3 drivers with 10.6.7. Blue or black screens, no matter what kexts mixes I tried 🙁

 

[Whaditis]

Just installed the new drivers as well thanks to your link and I must say quite an improvement.

Thanks

Whad

 

[VirtualRain]

Good to hear.

 

[colinsky]

Thanks, VirtualRain, the Nvidia drivers solved my MacPro graphics corruption!

 

[VirtualRain]

Note that this reared it's ugly head again for me after updating to 10.6.8... turns out there's another new NVIDIA Quadro driver that solved the problem...
http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro-macosx-256.02.25f01-driver.html

I wonder why Apple is shipping problematic Nvidia drivers in it's last two OS updates? And I'm also wondering why this is so isolated... only a few people seem to be impacted. Odd.