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Blue-line artifacting with nVidia graphics cards


sandy333
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I use an Apple Cinema HD 30 monitor. It is one gorgeous screen, but I have a weird problem with nVidia graphics cards: Light blue speckles or 1-pixel-wide lines that only appear at transitions between colors. For example, in a jpeg of blue sky, light blue speckles appear over the slight changes in shadings of blue as the sky becomes darker toward the top of the screen. Or in a photo of the seashore, there will be a line of 1-pixel light blue dots at the boundary between sand and water. Finder windows are surrounded by an irregular line made of light blue 1-pixel dots that outline the drop shadow. This is only visible at 2500x1600 (and at post, see below), but it makes the system useless, since 2500x1600 is the resolution I use for my work.

 

Eventually I noticed that the blue lines are visible on the Cinema HD 30 during post as 1-pixel lines that look like outlines around the characters, which makes it definitely an nVidia problem rather than a driver problem since OSX is not yet loaded. The lines are only visible during post on a large monitor like the Cinema HD; they aren't visible on smaller screens. The problem seems to be specific to nVidia. It does not show up with ATI cards at all, but ATI cards are poorly supported in 10.5.8 and AFAIK the netkas ATI drivers for my ATI HD 4850 don't work with 10.5.8 on my hardware.

 

I started out with a BFG 9400GT but have tried XFX 9400GT, BFG 9600 and a few other nVidia chipsets. BFG tech support said they'd seen the problem in a few of their cards but not often enough to have any advice for me. It was nice to have some validation, because I haven't seen any other mention of this on the boards. They suggested that I just try other cards until I got one that worked.

 

Armed with the information that I could see the lines during post and therefore could test cards without having to boot into Leopard, I began trekking back and forth to Fry's. Buy one, plug it in, boot to post, pull it out, take it back. So far, they all do it -- every card with an nVidia chipset that Fry's happens to carry.

 

Has anybody else seen this, and what have you done about it? I'm getting ready to throw in the towel. It's a shame, because the setup is nice and the display is gorgeous in every other respect.

 

Any advice greatly appreciated. Help save my sanity.

 

(Gigabyte EP45-UD3P, Core Duo, 1GB RAM, currently BFG 9400GT graphics card, UD3P package and OSX from an Apple disk, currently at 10.5.8. (Although as I explain here, it's likely that none of this has anything to do with the problem)).

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