Display artifacts in Mavericks

Okay... so, I reproduced the plugging in Thunderbolt Display 3 times in a row with three crashes.

THEN.... I opened terminal and did this...

sudo rm /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist

sudo rm /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist.lockfile

sudo reboot

Started up the MacBook Pro, waited a minute, plugged in the Thunderbolt Display, it didn't crash!

fingers crossed

My issues didn't resolve either.

I ended up taking mine into Apple. I had a mid-2010 that was having similar issues but was flaged as a known issue and free repairs up to 3 years after date of sale. Well, I got the ol 1-2-3 SCREW on that one, they wouldn't give it to me without paying since I was 4 months over. I didn't know about the free repair until I was researching issues with my current model.

So, I also offered them my 2011 MacBook Pro and they said they were not aware of any issues with 10.9 causing video issues. While preparing my system to take to Apple, I installed the original drive that came with it and it had 10.8 on it, so I tested it out and sure enough, having the same issues. So, at this point it probably is hardware issue. I told them the forums on here were covered with everyone having the same issues after upgrading, but they said it probably wasn't the same issues. LOL. WHATEVER.

Sounds like some sacrifical lambs are going to have to bite the bullet and go into Apple. They haven't got back to me if they found it to be a hardware issue yet or not.

Me too, the issue seems won't resolve, although I did clean install Mavericks & use migration utility. And sometimes the system just gives spinning balls and hang. Check the console log and it mostly happened after google software update or something.

So I ended up selling my 2 weeks old mbp retina 13" late 2012 (luckily I still can earn extra ~200 bucks, because I got previous one pretty much cheaper🙂) and bought brand new 15-inch retina Haswell with dedicated gpu. Casually i switched the Intel Iris to nvidia chip; or vice versa using gfxStatus and do normal daily computing with sleep mode set to 1 minute. So far I never encountered any display artifact issue after sleep mode like the the previous one I had.

Whether this is mavericks or hardware issue, I still have no clue. No useful log and whatsoever can be enquired from system console. But I still do believe that Mavericks is the real culprit here. :S

I am also having this problem on my 20" iMac (2008). After the upgrade to Mavericks, I noticed that certain shades of grey (ex: notification center background) didn't show up right. The color looked grainy and textured. The problem wasn't that bad, and I was able to ignore it.

A week or so ago, I started noticing artifacts in iMovie 10. The problem quickly transformed iMovie into a pixellated mess. I called Apple and we did a PRAM reset and the problem was gone, until today. I opened iMovie this morning, and all was well. I edited some clips in a project, re-orderd them, added sound effects, and then: suprise! A screen-full of artifacts. I quit iMovie, logged out, and logged into a different user account. The entire screen was full of artifacts when I clicked 'Log In'. It logged in, and everything was normal (except for a few artifacts in the log-in animation). I opened up Safari and found ARTIFACTS instead of websites.

Any help/advice?

I have actually "fixed" the artifacts issue on my Mac Pro but with a pretty daft workaround. I found the artifacts only appeared after I'd allowed the screen and / or computer go to sleep.

So I have set the energy saver preferences (System Preferences > Energy Saver > "screen" & "computer" sliders) to "never" (sliders to furthest right possible) for both the screen and computer sleep.

Not ideal. But it does work. Permanently. For me.

We need a Mavericks update to sort this out properly, I think.

Okay, I'll give that a try!

I just heard back from Apple, they said there is a hardware issue with logic board and so its being sent off to be repaired. I figure at this point, I don't have any other choice, but to see if Mavericks breaks the replacement.

They did advise that I should NOT be running 16GB of RAM in my MacBook Pro. Really?

It looks like Apple might be aware of the problem and is working on fixes related to "graphics drivers" in beta versions of 10.9.1...

http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/11/21/apple-seeds-second-os-x-1091-beta-to-d evelopers-with-mail-improvements

I've been having issues with both the Mail app and these graphics glitches, so hopefully the next update will fix all of this.

appleInsider just mentioned 10.9.1 would provide graphics performance improvement, but no fix for graphics bug?

I suppose if your GPU hasn't been destroyed, then software could fix it. In my case, I booted up the MacBook with 10.8 and the issue still remained, thus after installing 10.9, my hardware failed.

I suppose if your ONLY getting the articfacts and your system doesn't crash, perhaps your card hasn't failed and would be fixed with the update.

Just a guess.

Yes, it might not be a hardware issue. But in that article, there's no software bug fix mentioned for graphics, so I'm not sure if 10.9.1 will address it?

This is extremely disapointting. I have an early 2011 MBP 15", and I experiece the same display artifact issue when the display goes to sleep. I use this MBP both with and without my thunderbolt display.

At one point it started to get so bad that I could not see anything and my laptop became completely useles.

Here are some of the things I tried to remedy my situation,

1) Did an 'Option' boot and started up from the 10.9 recovery partition. No artifacts (even though booting into the installed OS resulted in a completely unusable state, which required a hard reboot).

2) Used Disk utility while booted on the recovery partition to verify the disk...no repairs needed. Ran a repair anyway just to see if it helped...No help...

3) Booted in recovery, erased the partition, and did a clean install of Mavericks, then reloaded my files from Time Machine. After this attempt the MBP is usable when booting to the startup disk, but the artifacts are still there, especially when the display sleeps.

I am very unhappy with this, as it appears to be a software issue (since there is no issue when booting to the recovery partition), and it has impacted my use of this laptop for over a month now. To the point where it was unusable until I did a clean install and TM Backup recovery (which took almost 8 hours of my day).

This is a critical flaw, and unacceptable. These issues seem to be happening more frequently with Apple post 2011, and I worry it is cause for concern. I dont want to see more of the late 90s Apple, that launched failure after failure. I like the early 2003-2010 Apple which produced innovation after innovation, and proved to be the market leader.

FIX THIS!

Same thing here, same machine. MBP mid 2010

Ditto here. Please find a fix for this, Apple. MacBook Pro 17" - mid 2010. Clean install of 10.9, and prior OS ran perfectly on it. Resetting PRAM only temporary fix, usually have to reboot completely for artifacting to go away. All hardware tests show everything is working fine. Permissions all okay. This is a software issue.

All I have to do is to stream video from Netflix to make artifacting happen system wide - in Finder windows, Safari, etc.

Crossing fingers that 10.9.1 attempts a fix on the graphic drivers.