Weird checkerboard effect glitch - 7970m - 13.1 WHQL

This seemed to get zero attention on the 13.1 driver thread so I'm reposting here. Has anyone seen a checkerboard effect show up anywhere during gameplay or application use while on the 13.1 driver? I see it a little on the 12.11 beta but not to this scale. The card is native clock speeds but I'm not sure where it is coming from. I do have a few ideas but I would like your input.

Here is an example but the most common place to reproduce is actually the sidebar on the Facebook website (oddly enough).



What do you think could be causing this? Just so you know this happened on Windows 8 on 12.11 beta but only on one application and it is the same deal in Windows 8. I never installed 13.1 on Windows 7 so I have no idea if it would be this bad on that OS but I suspect it would be.

 

Are you using the Mobility driver? Did you fully un-install the previous driver? And do you have switchable graphics enabled?

 

Yes I am (it wouldn't install a driver otherwise)

Of course including following instruction on ensuring a fully clean install.

No I do not but I tried the installation with Enduro active as well as Enduro inactive. Usually I have Enduro turned off on my laptop for performance reasons.

 

Maybe test 12.10 and below and if you still see the issue, the problem could be a faulty video card, or perhaps it is overheating.

 

i had similar problem with amd drivers, flash and firefox. check other browsers if they are working fine

 

Same thing for me. Installed 13.1 last week and those checkboards started popping up occasionally. Never saw it in the 12.11 betas or anything prior.

 

I had a somewhat similar problem on my 680M was getting that kind of distortion but on my whole screen... like blue little squares or the checkerboard effect. But it often froze after that, and eventually got so bad I had to send my laptop in for a GPU replacement. Hopefully there is no fault with your 7970m

 

It happens to me, but only in Firefox and eventually goes away if I do a bit of scrolling up and down.

 

It isn't overheating as it is happening on the desktop. No heavy background activity. The issue is nearly non-existant on 12.11 beta drivers although it does show in one minor application. Gets much worse in 13.1.

The issue actually doesn't happen with Flash.

Thanks for the confirmation.

Yea... The issue actually seems like memory corruption. This gets combined with an issue with the mouse cursor getting corrupted randomly (vertical line + a few angled lines coming off of it) and some odd video driver crashes I'll likely be calling Alienware while the warranty is still good. One theory I have is that if there is a hardware issue something they are doing in 12.11 and 13.1 is causing the issue to be more obvious in potentially defective cards.

Yes. On most pages it will but on Facebook's side bar it is constant and is the only place I can consistently reproduce it. Most likely due to the way it is written.

 

Hey Shinji,

I get the same with 13.1. Only firefox though. But i found it so annoying i uninstalled it and went back to 12.10 and since then everything is back to normal.
It seems a few people are experiencing this so this is quite worrying if your theory is saying we may all have potentially defective cards!

 

Keep in mind that it could be a driver bug. There is no way to be sure but I've seen hardware issues be driven out by software. Given that I'm on Windows 8 I won't be able to go all the way back to 12.10 so I'm sitting on 12.11 beta 11 at the moment. I'm still deciding on when/if I'm calling Alienware on this issue.

P.S. - I'm interested to know if anyone is on Windows 7 and getting this issue.

 

Just so you guys know I opted to wait it out and see if it was a driver issue. AMD 13.2 Beta 3 seems to have cleared this issue.

"Resolves Texture flickering seen in DirectX9.0c applications."

I know it seems unrelated but remember that Firefox supports WebGL which uses DirectX. I know because I built Firefox from source and needed the DirectX libraries to do so on Windows.

Anyways I installed 13.2 beta 4 and can't reproduce it anymore. I'll update tomorrow and let you know for sure but I think we can get the hardware issue out of our head and write it off as a driver bug.

 

Great!

 

Remember how I said I would let you know once I knew for sure? Well I know now that it is NOT resolved... Still getting it at my reproduction point.

With that in mind I test on other browsers...

Google Chrome: Negative. It doesn't happen on that browser.
Internet Explorer 10 (Windows 8): Negative here as well



Now then how do I report it to AMD?

EDIT: Checked on Firefox Nightly as well (21.0a1 (2013-01-27)) and it still happens on that build. Just not as bad.

EDIT: Found a possible workaround. Disable hardware acceleration in Firefox. (Firefox -> Options -> Advanced -> General -> Uncheck "Use Hardware Acceleration when Available)

There is a similar report for Mac OS but it looks worse over there (happens when panning).

EDIT: Posted a bug on Mozilla bugzilla about it given I found a similar issue on Mac OS.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=837489

 

I know that I for the moment (not after tomorrow) have 7970m cards in my M18X R2 and under Windows 8 12.10 worked excellently but had issues with crossfire in some games, so I upgraded but every driver in the 12.11 beta and 13.1 and 13.2 (all beta drivers) had the issue you described, but it is also present in Logmein host app plugins in IE, and in the Windows Music App under Metro. However under games it's all fine and dandy.

I do not believe that its a hardware issue at this point as it isn't there with 12.10 but rather AMD and their lackluster drivers working their voodoo on our systems.

 

Simple, use Chrome... the best browser

 

This kind of advise is not necessary here. This is a legitimate issue that we are trying to resolve and some of us do not wish to switch browsers. Also as indicated above we have this issue appearing in other applications.

This is looking more like a driver bug as I work on Firefox. Doing regression testing I went back as far as the beginning of 2012 and was able to see it there. AMD broke something between 12.11 beta 11 and 13.1 but what?

EDIT: Checked 12.10 WHQL and of course the issue is not present. Also tested with Enduro on on 13.2 and naturally the issue is not present (because Firefox is using the HD 4000). I wish there was a "fix" for this other than turning off hardware accel in Firefox or having Enduro on. I'll leave Enduro on for a week and see how it pans out...

 

Attention everyone!

If you have an AMD card and are getting this issue with Enduro off please submit an issue report for this. This includes desktop users too so if someone has a desktop getting this let them know too (they don't support Enduro obviously). We need to make sure AMD is aware of this. It looks like a driver bug that started showing up sometime during 12.11 beta and became a big issue in 13.1 and 13.2 beta.

Mozilla bug report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=837489 (This bug report shows that desktop AMD users are seeing this)

AMD Issue Reporting Form for AMD Catalyst™ 12.10 and 12.11 Beta for Mobility products

AMD Issue Reporting Form for AMD Catalyst™ 13.1

AMD Issue Reporting Form for AMD Catalyst™ 13.3 Beta

P.S. - Setting Firefox to High Performance will NOT have it use the AMD card. It still appears to use the Intel card per about:support when I checked it. Enduro has to be disabled via Fn+F7 to get it to use the AMD card.

 

I'm going to bump my thread a bit...

I've been trying to figure this out with Mozilla Devs and a few other people and someone else brought up a thread. For those getting this issue before please enable hardware acceleration then set the following to true.

gfx.direct2d.disabled

Let me know if it clears the issue for you.

 

Hi. I made an account to reply to you. I am running an AMD radeon 7870 (xfx double d) desktop graphics with amd 13.3 beta3 drivers. I have had that firefox checkerboard issue ever since I installed it in my computer, which was 2 days ago.

Disabling hardware acceleration works. What you suggested, making true "gfx.direct2d.disabled" worked!! Thanks!!!


My gfx card is new. I'm going to use my graphics card for a while to make sure its stable and such. Your advice helped greatly. The gfx card still could be bad, but i'm leaning towards AMD poorly written drivers.

 

I've been tracking this with Mozilla. AMD came back a couple of times and stated the bug was not on their end. Unfortunately they have not detailed how they determined that. They solely blamed it on the Azure implementation in Firefox. At this point it has yet to be determine how to go about fixing it... Do make sure you post your system details in the bug report thread to let them know you also have the issue.

Also are you running Windows 7 or Windows 8? If the former do you have update KB2670838 (Platform update for Windows 7 - Prerequisite for IE10)?

 

i have been experiencing this same checkered pattern on my display as well, i thought it was my overclock settings on my modded vbios, i messed with the 2d clocks and raised the voltages a little to see if it would help, well it didnt, the only thing that has worked for me is installing the Intel ivy bridge display driver from dell.com and use enduro instead of just using the 7970m full time, i haven't noticed any issues im my games, and the checkered pattern is now gone, i hope this helps you guys out

 

At this point it is known to affect only AMD 7xxx series cards on driver version 13.1 or newer. I don't know if any progress is being made at this point but AMD has not indicated how they determined why it isn't a driver issue or why they won't resolve it in a driver update.

 

Is there any way to solve problem currently? I have glitches in firefox.

 

There is a nice long bug report going on at Firefox's end.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=837489

Last official word...

For now you can try this.
Open a new tab and go to about:config (type that in the address bar)
Click the "I'll be careful, I promise" button. You can break stuff in here for real.
In the search gfx.direct2d.disabled then set that entry to true
Now restart Firefox.

This should workaround the issue until either Mozilla or AMD fix it permanently. Watch the bug report just in case they do ever fix it.

 

Are there any side effects to using this workaround?

 

None that I've seen.