VPCZ1 - Got a problem with my nvidia card... Am I alone with this ?

Bad news for me..

I noticed yesterday that my monitor had a weird problem, I checked with the different cards then I figured out the problem comes from the nVIDIA card...

I made a video to illustrate the problem,
you'll have to look at the top of the screen, near the head of the guy.

YouTube - VPCZ1 - Nvidia card problem...

Do you see what is happening when I use the nvidia card ?

I'm almost 100% sure that I got such a problem recently, likely one day ago... I watched lots of movie without noticing it and now it is bothering me. It doesn't only affect the border of the window but the movie itself too, even in fullscreen and that's boring...
I thought maybe I just need to reinstall the nvidia sony's driver and it'll went away.. But it came back as soon as I installed them.

However I tried Optimus driver on my machine and I checked carefully for such a similar problem but there wasn't any noticeable problem
It might be hard to evaluate the problem just like I did with normal driver because I didn't really now what graphic was use to render my desktop with such a movie ( however it seemed it was the nvidia because the movie usually do not render correctly at all with intel HD but I used latest intel HD driver they might be different from the one that are included with the original sony's graphic driver. ) So I decided to ran a 3DMark 06 benchmark with the optimus driver.
Cool surprise , no noticeable bugs , and quite acceptable performance. It endded up with a 5600 score at default speed. I ran it again but with overclocked nvidia frequency - 610 - 1363 - 880 it scored 6936 that's not bad for optimus beta driver, it would have made about 200 more with the original sony's driver.

I'll make a clean install to make sure it does not come from my system.
And maybe ... I may have to call sony :/

 

what's the problem exactly? When you drag a paused video around you get a little tearing? How often are you planning on dragging paused videos around?

 

it nothing about the video... anything I would have taken, like a simple window, got the same problem when I shake it.
There is line at the top of my screen which is flickering..
An other example : YouTube - VPCZ1 nvdia card problem example 2

It only happens with the nvidia cards and it flickers in every conditions..in games, video, even when moving objets on the desktop.

 

Don't have that issue here at all. Not with video, not with windows, ever. So don't know why it's happening, maybe reinstall the nvidia/intel drivers...

 

Yes I did it, but it doesn't make any change ( it's buggy only with the nvidia ) however when I tried the nvidia optimus driver... there's no such issue.
Well, clean w7 install...

 

it could be an artifact due to the nvidia dowclocking to 2d speeds. Does it happen when you plug in an external monitor. What is your refresh rate set to? Perhaps power management is setting it down to 40hz?

 

Most Sony LED backlit displays on Vaio's are set at a firm 59Hz. That is screen tearing in the video. Plain and simple. It must just be the NVIDIA driver stack, seeing as how the Intel GMAHD doesn't exhibit those issues. If this is not the issue you're talking about, your camera must not have captured the problem, because the only thing I see is tearing.

EDIT: My G210m does exactly the same thing in the same exact line across the top of the screen, though it has never bothered me, as it really only does it when dragging windows. Blu-Ray's look pixel for pixel, perfect.

 

The Vaio Z can change the display refresh to 40hz based on how you set it and also the power management settings. 40hz can definitely introduce increased artifacts.

 

Wow, the progress in technology never ceases to amaze me. 40 hz? Really? As if 60 wasn't low enough. :/

 

Let me know when you start to notice a difference.

 

after trying to install , and reinstall drivers several time without solving the the problem, an installation even made my computer crashing then x__x then I couldn't remove the nvidia driver and the cards weren't recognized anymore, resolution was 800x600 and I couldn't reinstall it.
There were surely a way to repair it but that pissed me off a bit so I decided to make a good and clean install once again.


Fortunately the problem left when I made a clean windows 7 installation.
Sorry for boring topic, thanks for those who tried to help!

 

To me it looks like the rendering fps rate from nvidia card is not vertically synchronized with the 60Hz screen refresh rate.

 

Exactly what I was trying to say, but you said it sooo much better. The panel's refresh rate under the nvidia card is 59Hz and I don't think the nvidia driver stack likes to sync up w/ that refresh rate. To the OP.... Try running "DriverSweeper" commonly found at guru3d.com and let it get rid of all past nvidia driver remnants, then reboot, reinstall the driver of choice, then reboot, and done

 

Nvidia's 59hz refers to 59.94 is the very standard refresh rate for displays. All hdtv's prefer this and 60i video is actually encoded to match the 59.94 so that is not the issue.

Could be pulldown issue, telecine issue, a number of different issues. Not knowing the op's source format makes it hard to diagnose.

My money is still on 40hz.