Screen Flicker 10.6

cybero's picture

Anyone else been getting the most horrendous screen flickers and consequent slow downs, freeze ups and application crashes when programming with either GLSL or OpenCL under 10.6.x ?

[ Just in case you wondered, I have and was beginning to seriously wonder about taking the machine back to the vendor as it is under warranty, due to a serious spate of such screen flickering resulting, in one instance, a keyboard that now won't be recognized by any of my previously compatible Macs :-( ]

Even something as relatively straight forward as GLSL-SphereMorph.qtz can cause such screen flickering problems that just can't be found, as such , under Leopard 10.5.x

cwright's picture
Re: Screen Flicker 10.6

Yes, I got this in early versions of 10.6 on my MacBook Pro (pre-unibody, late 2008 model). There was one build where everything flickered as soon as CL was in use in QC... no idea why.

For me, later updates have corrected this problem, and I've not seen it in a while (that said, with QC4 crashing on CL/mesh stuff now, I haven't been able to actually test it).

It's not a defective machine, it's (apparently?) inept nvidia developers. (I don't know why driver writing suddenly became so impossibly difficult in 10.6... nvidia was trumpeting their CUDA platform (which they base their DX, GL, and CL drivers off of) as "Teh Best Platform Evar" at wwdc and siggraph, implying that they'd be ahead of the game with working drivers...)

cybero's picture
Re: Screen Flicker 10.6

Thanks for the rapid response & heads up.

I am currently booting in Leopard and think that's going to be a very likely scenario for the foreseeable future.

Apart from anything else, I've got work to do :-) and can't afford all the aggravating 10.6.x down time.

Looks to me like SL and OpenCL is a bit of a dangerous hobby in some ways.

I would give 10.6.2 a try, but with the foreknowledge borne of prior acquaintance that Iterators won't work right, and that exactly the same problem with screen flicker happens, I shall await 10.6.3 and try to get OpenCL working from time to time on 10.6.2.

The most aggravating thing about this is that no compositions that require QC 4 / OpenCL or GLSL for that matter can be completely guaranteed to work AOK in a standard supposedly supported 10.6 installation.

I shall, once again, be reporting this to Apple and then be putting the matter to bed until the distro vendor comes up with a solution by themselves or with their coding partners and buddies.

Cheers :-)