cswiger

Hi, all--

I just figured out a 100% reliable way to reproduce the "purple haze" problem that various people have mentioned in the main "Catalyst and HL2" thread or in 4.11 and 4.12 beta driver problems

First, start CS:S and run the Video Stress Test through once. With 4.11, all is good, with 4.12b I see the four panels flickering but aside from that known issue (apparently w/4.12 + AMD CPU's) things are good.

Once you get back to the CS:S main menu, alt-tab out of CS:S and do something for a second or two, and then switch back to CS:S and re-run the stress test. With the second runthrough, I always get images like:







Pretty funky, huh? The full-size .BMPs and other images are under:

http://www.pkix.net/~chuck/HL2/

Can anyone try to repeat this and see whether you also get the purple haze to show up like this?

--
-Chuck

PS: Yes, there is a point to "if doing XXX causes a problem, don't do XXX", but I suspect that people getting the purple textures *without* alt-tabbing out of the program might actually have some program like MBM or some other utility/virus scanner running in the background which might cause this same problem to appear.

So if you are getting the purple haze, it might well be worth your while to kill all unnecessary processes and see whether that fixes the issue. Obvious advice, perhaps, but anything that helps is worth trying, right?

__________________
Do you remember Shalebridge Cradle?
Beware! The Cradle *doesn't* forget....

AMD Opteron 185 @ 2.6GHz/200HTT | 2GB G.Skill DDR3200 @ 2-3-2-5/1T | 512MB eVGA 8800GT @ 600/1800 | SB Audigy 2ZS eX, Outlaw 1050 6.1ch amp, Paradigm speakers | MSI K8N Diamond Plus mainboard | black Lian-Li USB68 case + Foxconn FX600-GLN 600W PSU | 2xWDC3200AAKS (RAID1) | Sony GDM-F500R CRT, BENQ G2400W LCD

Chaos

can you do me a favour, make any change to your ingame video settings and restart CS:Source Video Stress test and let me know if the purple goes away

__________________

cswiger

You bet, Chaos, interesting idea to check.

After doing a run with purple via alt-tabbing, and then toggling Vsync from off to on, most of the purple went away. In particular, all 4 panels were clear of purple, and sections of the railings and the three vertical pipes on the wall near the transparent guy & fire were fine. However, there was still "purple haze" on the floor sections.

I repeated the test again, this time changing Model and Texture detail down from high to medium. Oddly enough, the purple haze became much worse after changing these settings and retesting. From what it looks like to me, the purple haze appears mostly on objects which have bump-mapped textures?

The above was using CS:S command line options of "-console -preload -mat_preloadshaders -heapsize 200000". I'm now going to do a third run with no special options enabled, and then change Model and Texture detail back up from medium to high (which should load higher res texmaps).

OK. This went pretty much as the first test; after alt-tabbing to do a run with purple showing up everywhere, turning the options from medium to high produced a mostly clear run, with purple present mostly on the floor, and some on the bottom of the forth panel, but not on the first three panels, railings, or the vertical pipes.

__________________
Do you remember Shalebridge Cradle?
Beware! The Cradle *doesn't* forget....

AMD Opteron 185 @ 2.6GHz/200HTT | 2GB G.Skill DDR3200 @ 2-3-2-5/1T | 512MB eVGA 8800GT @ 600/1800 | SB Audigy 2ZS eX, Outlaw 1050 6.1ch amp, Paradigm speakers | MSI K8N Diamond Plus mainboard | black Lian-Li USB68 case + Foxconn FX600-GLN 600W PSU | 2xWDC3200AAKS (RAID1) | Sony GDM-F500R CRT, BENQ G2400W LCD

Leekay07

Guys I played with this issue this weekend on my friends ATI 9800 Pro. With any version of driver. Its because he has the ram running to high. Lower the ram speed and it will go away.

I tried all the settings but in the end the best cure was to lower the Ram speed.

brownstonemr

The only time I ever see purple is if I change from say 2xAA to none and apply and then run the stress test without fully exiting the game and restarting.

If I just apply and then go straight to the stress test then the purple appears.

Does not happen with AF.

cswiger

Hmm. My x800 Pro card is running at its stock 472/445 MHz GPU/VRAM speeds, and I was playing HL2 using 4.11 for hours last week with no signs of video problems (I do get some sound stuttering, though). I can also run the Video Stress test several times, changing options each time without a sign of problems. In particular, for each of the tests mentioned above, I first do a run through to make sure everything looks normal, modulo the disappearing weapon & blinking panels problem new w/4.12b.

Until today, I hadn't seen a sign of purple haze at all. But I forgot to fire up Fraps before running CS:S in order to grab a screenshot of the 4.12 blinking panels, so I tried alt-tabbing out of CS:S, running Fraps, and then re-doing the Video Stress Test.

As soon as I went back and re-ran the test, boom! Purple haze shows up.

If I quit CS:S and check my system temps, I'm running 52C on the card, 36C ambient mobo, and 48C CPU. I've got a dual-fan 430W Enermax PS, as well as a decent case adding two intake fans in the front and one additional outtake fan just below the PS. Voltages are fine.

So I don't think it's a problem with overclocking my card, but I'm willing to fire up PowerStrip and try retesting using AGP 4x (rather than 8x), and underclock my card to 402/370 MHz (which is the slowest I can set it to via PS). PowerStrip wants me to reboot after tweaking the AGP speed, so lemme stop here and get back to you.

__________________
Do you remember Shalebridge Cradle?
Beware! The Cradle *doesn't* forget....

AMD Opteron 185 @ 2.6GHz/200HTT | 2GB G.Skill DDR3200 @ 2-3-2-5/1T | 512MB eVGA 8800GT @ 600/1800 | SB Audigy 2ZS eX, Outlaw 1050 6.1ch amp, Paradigm speakers | MSI K8N Diamond Plus mainboard | black Lian-Li USB68 case + Foxconn FX600-GLN 600W PSU | 2xWDC3200AAKS (RAID1) | Sony GDM-F500R CRT, BENQ G2400W LCD

cswiger

I get the same result when running at 402/368 MHz clocks. I ran through the stress test 5 times in a row with no purple. But alt-tab out and back, boom! purple.

Also--

I see the same thing; changing anti-aliasing setting always seems to result in purple unless I fully exit and restart CS:S. Changing the other settings like Vsync or detail levels doesn't seem to cause purple.

__________________
Do you remember Shalebridge Cradle?
Beware! The Cradle *doesn't* forget....

AMD Opteron 185 @ 2.6GHz/200HTT | 2GB G.Skill DDR3200 @ 2-3-2-5/1T | 512MB eVGA 8800GT @ 600/1800 | SB Audigy 2ZS eX, Outlaw 1050 6.1ch amp, Paradigm speakers | MSI K8N Diamond Plus mainboard | black Lian-Li USB68 case + Foxconn FX600-GLN 600W PSU | 2xWDC3200AAKS (RAID1) | Sony GDM-F500R CRT, BENQ G2400W LCD

Leekay07

I`ll play some more when I get home in the morning

Leekay07

cswinger on 4.12b what happens when you enable overdrive?

Only Iam asking cos I am pretty sure that 4.12 has overclocked the cards some way or other. I get more than a 10fps increase over 4.10 on aquamark 3.

cswiger

Overdrive gives me a slight performance boost-- maybe 2-3 FPS in the CS:S results, maybe 150 points in 3Dmark 2001se. I agree that 4.12b benches faster: by itself it gave me about a 5 FPS inprovement to the CS:S video test results.

I don't see any difference in visual quality or in whether purple shows up, but I've been leaving it off while doing these tests since it's reasonable for people wonder whether OC'ing the card is leading to video artifacts. :-)

__________________
Do you remember Shalebridge Cradle?
Beware! The Cradle *doesn't* forget....

AMD Opteron 185 @ 2.6GHz/200HTT | 2GB G.Skill DDR3200 @ 2-3-2-5/1T | 512MB eVGA 8800GT @ 600/1800 | SB Audigy 2ZS eX, Outlaw 1050 6.1ch amp, Paradigm speakers | MSI K8N Diamond Plus mainboard | black Lian-Li USB68 case + Foxconn FX600-GLN 600W PSU | 2xWDC3200AAKS (RAID1) | Sony GDM-F500R CRT, BENQ G2400W LCD