Q: display anomalies

I'm having exactly the same problems as many users have reported here. Mine is the 2.16 GHz Core Duo MacBook Pro running 10.6.4, with the ATI X1600, bought in mid-2006. I never had any problems until sometime earlier this year, when the random blocks of pixels, lines, or splashes of colour started appearing. The problem has been getting worse until now the computer will freeze around twice a day and I'll have to do a hard restart. When it freezes music will continue to play in the background and i can still move the cursor on screen, but none of the on-screen elements are responsive.

Has anyone solved the problem by downgrading to Leopard?

jmsjcarroll wrote:
Has anyone solved the problem by downgrading to Leopard?

I'm running Leopard. Still happening. But much better behaved after cleaning up the system with applejack.

At present, I can reliably cause Safari 5.0.2 on Leopard to eventually crash after glitching screen redraw by viewing this page:
http://www.apple.com/appletv/ and dragging the scroll bar up and down. This is with QuartzExtreme turned off.

This does not happen with other browsers.

Can others replicate this problem??

Ian Cheong wrote:
At present, I can reliably cause Safari 5.0.2 on Leopard to eventually crash after glitching screen redraw by viewing this page:
http://www.apple.com/appletv/ and dragging the scroll bar up and down. This is with QuartzExtreme turned off.

This behaviour resolved after turning QuartzExtreme back on having previously removed all of /Library/Internet-plugins and reinstalled from scratch.

Hbomb: I took the laptop to the Apple Store at Southcenter in Tukwila. From there it got shipped to the Apple Service Center, and then when repairs were done it was shipped directly to my house.

The worst of the graphics problems seem to be fixed, but I still have garbled graphics graphics occurring on some Flash websites. I have a suspicion this may be a Snow Leopard problem, since I installed this OS shortly before everything went to h*ll. Apple seems to assume no responsibility for it though. Bummer. Not sure I will be buying another Mac Laptop.

This post suggests faulty ATI drivers.
http://www.canmusaogullari.com/2010/08/macbook-pro-with-ati-radeon-x1600-display -anomalies/

I am presently inclined to agree, but there may be other contributors. To date, when my login screen and desktop have the horizontal line problem, it invariably disappears on safe boot. When left for a while, this problem propagates into other windows. I have not been able to verify a temperature relationship. Disabling QuartzExtreme did not reliably help. Deleting all /Library/Internet PlugIns did not resolve the Safari crashing problem. Old plugins may have contributed to the Safari crashing problem leaving other system resources corrupt.

My working hypothesis is that a combination of bad X1600 drivers +/- Safari causes low-level corruption in system resources, which spreads until the system will lockup/freeze. Whatever gets corrupted needs to be fixed to resolve the behaviour. One archive and install crashed and another failed to resolve the problem.

My latest recipe still manages to resolve the login screen and desktop horizontal line problem. (Some parts may prove to be superflous, but I am starting from a position of being able to reliably eradicate the bugs.)

1. restart
2. zap PRAM (hold cmd-opt-P-R when booting until the system chimes a second time)
3. safeboot (hold shift while booting)
4. delete suspected corrupted preferences (move or rename or delete - I think Apple recommends dragging to desktop; I use terminal) - all in /Library/Preferences/System Configuration; .GlobalPreferences.plist; com.apple.windowserver.plist; com.apple.loginwindow.plist
5. delete ATIX drivers as per link above
6. reinstall ATIX drivers by applying most recent OS update (I have been using OS10.5.8 update, since that is what I am using; I also copy the ATIX drivers into another folder in case I need to delete them again - have had to do this once already while experimenting)
7. reboot in single user mode (hold cmd-S while booting)
8. run # applejack AUTO
9. exit applejack before rebooting (press ctrl-C)
10. run # applejack in manual mode
11. manually choose item 3; say yes to clean cache files for specific users; clean your own userid
12. manually choose item 4; say yes to validate prefs for specific users; validate your own userid
13. reboot

Presently, I have QuartzExtreme enabled and am avoiding using Safari to see if the problem will recur. So far so good for a few days. Can anybody who has recurring problems who tries this recipe please report back?

(If you don't have applejack, get it from http://applejack.sourceforge.net/)

Ian Cheong wrote:
My latest recipe still manages to resolve the login screen and desktop horizontal line problem. (Some parts may prove to be superflous, but I am starting from a position of being able to reliably eradicate the bugs.)

13. reboot

It appears another step is required:
14. zap PRAM

While I have been able to temporarily get rid of display glitches, they still recur. After a recent crash with big color blocks on screen while the Mac was unattended, I did another safeboot and the problems seem to resolve. So have been looking harder at /System/Library/Extensions. Deleted a whole load of .kexts that claimed in getinfo window that claim to be for PPC only.

Notably, this included:
AppleNDRV
and
ATIRadeon.kext
ATIRadeon8500.kext
ATIRadeon8500GA.plugin
ATIRadeon8500GLDriver.bundle
ATIRadeon8500VADriver.bundle
ATIRadeon9700GLDriver.bundle
ATIRadeon9700VADriver.bundle
ATIRadeonGA.plugin
ATIRadeonGLDriver.bundle

...to report later how long the system behaves....

At this point, my system seems stable. No more glitches. The Safari bug I had is no longer a problem. (To see if you have it, go to http://www.apple.com/au/appletv/ and drag the scroll bar up and down quickly - does the page distort at the top?)

Now I'm not sure if it was a corrupted driver or a conflict with a .kext. Having deleted 106 extensions that said they were PowerPC only, the combo updater replaced 100 of them again on my Intel machine. So, if we assume a small bug in ATIRadeon drivers that results in corruption that pervades low level system resources, the fix is to delete the original damaged/buggy resource and replace whatever was corrupted by it along the way.

Possible minimal steps to resolve (if it doesn't work, more steps documented in my previous post may be required to removed other corrupted resources):
1. restart
2. zap PRAM
3. safeboot
4. use Disk Utility and repair preferences
5. in /System/Library/Extensions, delete all that start with ATIRadeon... plus delete AppleNDRV
6. run the latest MacOS combo updater for your system (in my case it was 10.5.8 combo updater)
7. restart
8. zap PRAM
9. allow to restart normally

Please report back success or failure.

Tried turning on QuartzGL, to see what happened. Glitches returned after a while. Suspect that some interaction of x1600 drivers and Quartz is what unleashes the bug.

The latest recipe seems to have fixed it again, so keeping fingers crossed.

Have you tried downgrading your firmware as it hints it in this link you've posted before?

http://www.canmusaogullari.com/2010/08/macbook-pro-with-ati-radeon-x1600-display -anomalies/

Heres a link for the MBP models

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1237

And this ones for the Firmware reset tool

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL976

ALSO:

Apple will be replacing all ATI x1900XT cards that have similar issues to ours.

http://www.macrumors.com/2010/09/27/apple-finally-acknowledges-and-addresses-ati -x1900-xt-issue/

Also I forgot to add that its not only macbook pros that are affected but all the macs (imac, mac towers) with the ATI X1600. If apple is willing to replace the ATI X1900XT with similar issues, then they should dam well replace the X1600.

Look at the examples of OP and most of you would have gotten similar distortions in games. I know i did.

Anybody got a link for the best place to report this to Apple? If enough people complain, maybe they'll acknowledge us too...

going through some of the first pages of this thread, someone previously directed people to submit reports here:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/macbookpro.html

but looks like over a year and 51pages of discussion later, apple still hasn't acknowledged anything?

so tired of text and images distorting...

Just sent a complaint to Apple. Hope they respond back. It goes without saying that they replace the X1600 cards as well because they are the same R520 core as the x1900XT they just replaced.