Unexplainable Screen Woes -- nVidia

[melchizedek]

This is an odd one. I have a 3D Fuzion nVidia 7600GS video card, which usually runs without much coaxing. Yet with Mageia 2, I'm getting weird screen distortions which I'm struggling to comprehend. I've enclosed a picture. I'm sorry it's not very good. Mr camera's a piece of rubbish; however, it should give you enough to go on.

As you can (hopefully) see, the screen's full of what looks like pinkish, elongated, fingerprints. The odd thing is, they don't show up in a screenshot (hence the photo). The marks themselves are fixed to the screen -- in other words, if I scroll down, the marks stay where they are -- although they do naturally fluctuate in size and intensity (i.e. they're not just fixed splodges which never change shape.) The marks also come and go. Sometimes they're hardly there -- then they can be all over the place and very prominent.

There's nothing wrong with my monitor... I reinstalled Linux Mint KDE last night and it worked fine. It's probably not a driver fault, as the drivers are proprietary and work fine in both Mint and Mandriva. So I'm guessing it's something to do with Mageia. I've tried disabling desktop effects -- nothing. I've tried disabling 'Enable render acceleration' -- nothing.

Any suggestions?

[wintpe]

ive seen similar with an ATI card and mageia 1

it was because i selected the wrong driver in that case and it was incorrectly setting up the refresh rate.

when i selected the right driver the problem disappeared.

if you can select a nouvou driver (I know ive spelt it wrong)

see if you get same results, or try lowering the refresh rate.

regards peter

[melchizedek]

Hi Peter,

In the case of Mageia 2, it correctly detected both my card and my usual refresh rate. I have however dropped the refresh from 75 to 60. I'll run it at that for the rest of the day and see if problem reoccurs.

Re: the nouveau (I've probably spelled it wrong, too) driver, usually it doesn't work so good for me, but I did try it, and in traditional fashion, it didn't work at all.

I'll persevere with the altered refresh rate, however. If that doesn't work, I'll report back. If it does work, I'll report back too and close the thread.

Thanks for the suggestions.

[melchizedek]

Okay, after an hour with the refresh set at 60 (instead of the possible 75), the problem persists.

Here's an interesting thing; the problem seems to worsen when I run certain things. For example, currently (and the problem seems to fluctuate quite markedly), looking at my desktop with Firefox dropped to the bar, the wallpaper displays perfectly. Then... when I run 'configure your desktop' from the kmenu, the dark blue background starts to show signs of deterioration. (See enclosed pic.) When I close 'configure your desktop', the deterioration disappears.

In this instance, the pattern is quite different from the pink smudges in the earlier picture. I have no idea why.

[wintpe]

i see convergence problems in that picture.

is this a CRT monitor, as it would be unusual to see convergence problems on a TFT/pannel type monitor.

It maybe that your monitor is having issues with some external interference or magnetic source if this is the case.

got new speakers?

regards peter

[melchizedek]

Hello Peter,

No, it's just a Neovo F-417 LCD screen. I did wonder about interference... but back-heeled it on the grounds that I can install other distributions and the problem goes away. Plus, certain software combinations seem to make it worse.

[doktor5000]

From the picture it looks totally different and not related, still you may want to try some suggestions from https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6103