trippy, psychedelic colors with 1.0-4349

[Ben Liblit]

The new 1.0-4349 drivers produce weird, psychedelic colors on my box. Most noticeable is that many shades of gray are instead blue or pale yellow.

A gradient from black to pure green is quantized into about sixteen or so steps rather than a smooth transition. A gradient from black to pure blue is black from start to finish, though blues do become visible if red and green have small non-zero values. A gradient from black to pure red is evenly split into sixteen smaller ramps. The first goes from black to blue; these gradually shift until the sixteenth ramp goes from red to magenta. A grayscale gradient from black to pure white is also broken up into sixteen smaller ramps: initially from black to blue, then gradually shifting until the sixteenth ramp goes from yellow to white.

This might be fun if it were still 1969; in 2003 it's rather unusable. What sort of bad trip is this driver on?

System details: box is a Red Hat 8.0 system with a self-built 2.4.20 kernel. NVIDIA's installer built a custom module for my kernel, which seemed to install without error. Nothing suspicious in /var/log/messages, /var/log/XFree86.0.log, or /var/nvidia-installer.log. Module is using internal AGP support.

Underlying hardware is an ABIT KG-7 motherboard and an MSI GeForce3 Ti 200 Pro graphics card. Monitor is a Hitachi CML174SXW LCD display connected via DVI.

Any suggestions?

[bwkaz]

What's your DigitalVibrance value set at in XF86Config? When I moved from 3123 to 4349, I noticed that the range of DigitalVibrance changed from 0->3 to 0->255, so I changed my config file to match (I had been using a setting of 2, so I tried 192, figuring that the scales were linear). And I saw much the same psychedelic stuff you seem to be seeing. Setting DigitalVibrance back to about 64 gave me close to what a setting of 2 had been giving me.

[Ben Liblit]

Originally posted by bwkaz
What's your DigitalVibrance value set at in XF86Config?

I don't have it set at all, which means it should be at its default value of 0. Explicitly setting it to various other values (2, 64, 192, 255) changes the look of things somewhat, but has no real effect on the messed up colors.

Drat. Any other ideas?

[bwkaz]

I don't suppose that LCD will take a DVI-A cord, will it? (-A is the analog "mode" of DVI)

People are reporting success with various kernel lockup issues when replacing the DVI-D->monitor cord (-D is digital) with a DVI-A->CRT adapter, then plugging a normal VGA monitor cord into that.

But that's not really causing psychedelic colors for them, just hard lockups, so I sort of doubt it'll do any good... :(

Maybe try a couple of different display devices, if possible?

[Ben Liblit]

Originally posted by bwkaz
I don't suppose that LCD will take a DVI-A cord, will it?
Actually, I can use a straight-up analog VGA monitor cable, and that does fix the problem!

So I guess this is a temporary workaround, which is better than nothing. But it's a tragic shame to use analog for such a crisp, sweet LCD display ... I really hope a DVI-D compatible fix can be found.

Thanks for the suggestions, bwkaz!

[bwkaz]

Yeah, if you haven't already, let linux-bugs@nvidia.com know that you, too, are having issues with the DVI output and the new driver. There are, like I said, a bunch of other people with DVI issues, so the more people tell them about it, the better they'll be able to figure out the problem.

[Ben Liblit]

Originally posted by bwkaz
Yeah, if you haven't already, let linux-bugs@nvidia.com know that you, too, are having issues with the DVI output and the new driver.

Yup, I've brought it to their attention. At their prompting, I tried out 4191 and found that it had the same problem. Here's hoping we nail down a solution ... these colors are making me weird. :afro2:

[petergphillips]

this might be slightly off topic, but worth a mention...

I've got the same problem with my Dell Dimension 8200, Dell 1702FP, GeForce Ti 500, RH8 and driver 1.0-4349 (first raised in thread: wrong colors with RH8, GeForce 3 Ti 200, DVI).

Running in my WinXP partition (using DVI input) I installed the latest Detonator drivers (43.45) and rebooted. After doing so all the colours were wrong - in exactly the same way as my RH8 partition (i.e. all greys shades of yellow and no nice clear colours)

Reinstalling the previous 41.09 driver fixed the problem.

Peter.

[Ben Liblit]

Originally posted by petergphillips
Running in my WinXP partition (using DVI input) I installed the latest Detonator drivers (43.45) and rebooted. After doing so all the colours were wrong - in exactly the same way as my RH8 partition (i.e. all greys shades of yellow and no nice clear colours)

Yup, same here. I didn't realize it when I started this thread, but the bug is cross-platform. Assuming NVIDIA coordinates version numbers across platforms, the bug appears to have been introduced somewhere between Windows driver release 4109 and Linux driver release 4191.

Hopefully the fact that Windows is affected too will encourage NVIDIA QA to make this bug a high priority. The narrow version interval should help.

[Andy Mecham]

Yep, i'm looking into it. Thanks for your assistance!

--andy

[Svaini]

*bump*

Same problem. Yellow lines all over the screen. Searching my ass off to find a solution, havn't come up with any, so if there is some progress around this area, please post it here, thanks =)

[netllama]

Same problem with which driver version? If you're experiencing this with 1.0-7676, please generate and post a bug report.

Thanks,
Lonni

[Svaini]

Xorg 6.8.2
NVidia Driver 7676
Monitor: BenQ T905
GeForce 4 TI4200

Attachments:

14227
14226

[netllama]

Please post a full bug report.

Thanks,
Lonni

[Svaini]

Sure, here is my nvidia bug report, once again, the problem is psychedelic colors (with 7676 in DVI mode, Analog works fine) Lot's of yellow lines and areas all over my screen, i.e this website is mostly yellow.

14236

Thanks

[netllama]

To be honest, this sounds like a hardware problem.

Does the color corruption exist with the nv X driver as well?
Can you capture this problem in a screenshot?

Thanks,
Lonni

[Svaini]

Works fine with the nv driver. Here's a very bad camera shot with the nvidia driver and this very page, but it'll give you an idea of how it is. See all that greenish yellow stuff?

14245

[netllama]

Actually, what I wanted to know is if you could capture this with a software screenshot, not with a camera.

Do you have a ~/.nvidia-settings-rc ? If so, please rename it, then run nvidia-settings and see if the problem persists.

Thanks,
Lonni

[Svaini]

I've tried removing the .nvidia-settings-rc file and running nvidia-settings, didn't change anything. The screenshot is showing normal colors.

14248

[netllama]

Does tweaking the settings for Digital Vibrance, or any of the "X Server Color Correction" settings in nvidia-settings have any impact on this problem?

Unfortunately, the GeForce 4 TI4200 that I have here doesn't exhibit this problem.

-Lonni

[Svaini]

yeah, changing gamma or digital vibrance or messing with any color stuff have a huge impact on the problem. Changing gamma from 1 to 1.05 will actually change some colors on the screen, i.e an area that was white will maybe turn blue. Still havn't managed to find a perfect balance on gamma, color correction and digital vibrance(which also flips out the colors a lot on some levels) :P