OSX Lion, Graphic Artifacts

Just out of curiosity, how many of you Lion users see this problem when booting into the recovery partition?

Nope, never from the recovery partition, installer or while booted in safe boot. I presume this is because the video drivers and OpenCL stuff isn't being loaded then?

Thanks for checking.

I could be wrong, but doesn't that rule out hardware issues?

Is it the general consensus that this is a software problem?

I had artifact issues with my MBP, but I was also getting them in recovery mode... Turns out it was hardware related and I got a replacement.

OMG, Andrew... I can't wait to try this later. We have the exact same iMac model.

It started about 1.5 months after I upgraded to Lion (about a month ago). I've done everything from reverting to an older update of Lion, PRAM resets or whatever you call ém, and even buying external fans and increasing my internal fan speeds! And yes, all seems fine when in safe mode since video drivers aren't fully loaded.

It first appeared when I was just watching video via VLC as I always do. Watching DS9, btw. Awesome! Anyway, checkered anomalies started appearing! And then lines... oh, the horror! Then, i didn't come back until after a week. Now it's always there after about 30 mins of use. Usually after watching video for 30mins. It got worse when I was working on a huge-*** Illustrator file.

I'm just glad/hoping it's not a hardware problem... I don't trust repair shops. All they know to do is change parts and charge you crazy money!

If this works, I will kiss you, Andrew! 😊

No need for kisses, YOHAN, but I'm almost certain the BIOS fix I've described will work for you. I haven't had a single problem since I did it and actually enjoy using my Mac again:-)

Good luck.

OKAY! i did it! the whole process took 5mins! We shall now see if it really got fixed. Will check back in a few days! :)

Andrew, it worked!

Now, my Mac is back to it's former glory! The GPU does run a little hotter... about 5 degrees hotter... but that's super normal. I haven't tested it yet, but maybe this would also solve some game graphics clipping in Windows7... we shall see.

i tell you... if i sent this to apple or any other service center... they would just replace my video card or logic board for thousands of dollars.

Thanks, man! You made this guy super happy! 😍

Yes, the BIOS fix should also solve related issues running under Windows (that's how I stumbled across it in the first place). The changes made to the graphics card's BIOS apply regardless of the OS - that's why it works running OS X.

I tried the BIOS fix on my mid 2007 iMac with an ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro with 256 MB of memory. In the past few months, I have been seeing artifacts that the top of the screen and its gotten progressively worse. Using the Radeon Bios Editor and ATI Winflash, I wasn't able to write any new BIOS settings to my card. Maybe I'm missing something, but when I try to apply my changed BIOS, Winflash tells me that it cannot find the VBIOS, despite having selected the one I edited with RBE. Does this method work with this graphics card?

NeoTrunks, are you running Windows from the Boot Camp partition or a virtual machine? Running a virtual machine won't give you direct access to the hardware. In any case, I don't think the BIOS fix will apply to a Radeon HD 2600. On the Windows side, reports were limited to Radeon HD 4XXX and 5XXX series cards (as mentioned in my original post).

I was definitely doing it from Boot Camp, running Windows 7 x64. Here is a screenshot of the glitching that I see in Mac OS.

There is pink, sometimes, yellow or blue discoloration. When dragging windows, the effect sort of spreads. It's something I can see even when using screensharing. It's also apparent, sometimes worse, in Windows on Boot Camp. I wonder if it's the same problem. It's just getting worse and worse.

That definitely looks like the same problem - those checkerboard squares are unmistakeable.

Radeon Bios Editor is supposed to work with the 2600 GPU, so I'm not sure what might be going wrong, but have you also tried the Apple supplied firmware updates for your iMac? This page lists the updates for various iMacs:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1599

For the mid-2007 iMac there's iMac graphics Firmware Update 1.0:

http://support.apple.com/downloads/iMac_Graphics_Firmware_Update_1_0

There are also a range of updates specifically for the Radeon 2600 that may apply to your machine:

http://support.apple.com/downloads/#radeon%202600

Obviously Apple were aware of issues with these cards across a range of machines (2007 and 2008 iMacs as well as Mac Pros), and they released a batch of firmware upgrades - which is great, or will be if you can get one of them to work🙂

Also take a look at:

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL938

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL71

I tried to install those updates, but each one told me that it wasn't needed. I did a bit of digging, and saw that my card's ROM Version is 113-B2250F-219, which doesn't meet the requirements of the updates. Apparently, there are a lot of old threads with people saying the same thing. From what I can see, Apple never issued an update for us with this graphics card.

I'm going to continue digging. I think manually modifying the firmware on my card is my best bet. I just need to figure out how to get it done.

Thanks for your help on this so far.

I have this issue as well iMac 11,3 27" i7.

For me, this was not only in the Lions, it was happening in SL (actually worse). My temporary solution to allow me to keep working was to get rid of the (System/Library/Extensions/) ATIxxxx.ktext's.

This completely stopped all artifacts and crashing, but of course because this disables acceleration, everything is choppy and things like screenshots don't work.

I would flash the card in a minut but I already have a partioned drive so I can't install boot camp.

I am completely shocked that either Apple, ATI, or even some sympathetic programmer can't or won't come up with a Mac version of this mod. It does not seem like it would be that big of a challange to port over. Not even some command lines or three?

Anyway, quick question to author of the fix...

If I boot using an external drive that has the boot camp Windows partition will I be able to access the hardware?

Or does it have to be the internal drive?

Thanks very much in advance,

A