Hullo Everyone,

In a few free moments I had over the weekend I attempted to upgrade the drivers on my system from 6.2 to 6.3. Before I did this everything was working perfectly. However, since doing it I am unable to get a signal over DVI once the Windows XP 64bit Professional Edition loading screen with the scrolling bar has finished.

This is immensly frustrating, as it means that I cannot run in Windows with the driver loaded and therefore lack any kind of hardware acceleration. In fact, the only way that I was actually able to get into Windows after this occured was by running in safe mode and uninstalling the driver. DVI works fine under safe mode and in normal Windows with no driver.

I have tried rolling back the driver and different drivers but they all reproduce the same issue. I am at a complete loss as to what has caused this but other people seem to have had a similar issue, albeit with a different card:

Please look here

I have posted this on ATI and Sapphire customer care but hopefully someone will be able to help me here too.

Thanks

hmm. never heard of the problems, but cant you just use the 6.2's if it was working perfectly?

Why update drivers if they were working perfectly?

Use drivercleaner in safe mode then reinstall 6.2's.

james.miller said:

hmm. never heard of the problems, but cant you just use the 6.2's if it was working perfectly?

Click to expand...

I tried rolling back the driver, uninstalling the driver under safe mode and running Driver Cleaner Pro but even with older drivers, including 6.2 the issue is still repoduced. It is bizarre.

If it's a Dual DVI card have you tried the other port?

Phil99 said:

If it's a Dual DVI card have you tried the other port?

Click to expand...

Yes, I have but the issue still persists. I am incredibly frustrated by it.

Is it trying to start up in a resolution your monitor doesnt support?

And have you also checked that your monitor is set to use the DVI input rather than the Analog input? you can select which input to use on my monitor.

As far as I am aware everything is set as being exactly how it was before I tried installing the new driver. Also DVI works when under safe mode and in normal XP with no driver installed. Does anyone else have any ideas?

Looks like it could be 'alternate DVI Operational Mode' in the CCC.

Read this, it maybe some help?

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17551385

fornowagain said:

Looks like it could be 'alternate DVI Operational Mode' in the CCC.

Read this, it maybe some help?

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17551385

Click to expand...

Yes, that could be it! Perhaps I will have to dig out an old analogue lead to screw about in Windows with the driver loaded and then switch back to DVI if I have sorted it out? I will have to try this, although it will probably be tomorrow evening by the time I get around to it.

williamw11 said:

Why update drivers if they were working perfectly?

Click to expand...

i'm stuck with the 6.2's too, i get a weird interference problem using the 6.3's (forcing it to other rates doesn't help) the chuck patch to allow oblivion to run with hdr and AA enabled is only for the 6.3's. i've tried it and it looks nice but the herring-bone effect does my brain in, hopefully ati sort it out soon.

This sounds similar to my problem in that after DMI pool gets ok'd my Dell 2005 goes blank completely ( with no signal being flashed up) the hdd whirs away and suddenly the light blue desktop background appears and windows loads as normal.

While not as serious as either of the above, still very alarming ( and silly)

fornowagain said:

Looks like it could be 'alternate DVI Operational Mode' in the CCC.

Click to expand...

This is a dumb question but where is 'alternative DVI operational mode' within the latest catalysts?

Following some advice from ATI tech support last night, I installed the 6.4's, hoping that they might alleviate my problems. The only slight change that they had was that now before the monitor loses signal, I get a random pattern of checker boards, multiple colours and other artifacts.

I was able to use the monitor using its analogue input.

The CCC did seem to be reporting my monitor wrong - under the maximum resolution that it is supposed to supprt, it stated 1920*1080. Obviously this is wrong for a 19" TFT with a native res of 1280*1024. I manually set this res as the max in the CCC. However, still no luck.

As a last resort I reinstalled Windows, and you guess it, the computer is still buggered.

I am at a complete loss as to what to do next. I will pursue advice from here, Sapphire and ATI in hope of fixing it so please help me if you can.

Thanks.

roadie said:

This is a dumb question but where is 'alternative DVI operational mode' within the latest catalysts?

I was able to use the monitor using its analogue input but performance was much worse than it was before the problem

Click to expand...

Under Digital Panel Properties > Attributes

But,,,,,if the DVI is not connected you may not get the digital panel bar. So maybe you need two monitors? One on the VGA and one on the DVI.

What do you mean by performance worse exactly?

fornowagain said:

Under Digital Panel Properties > Attributes

But,,,,,if the DVI is not connected you may not get the digital panel bar. So maybe you need two monitors? One on the VGA and one on the DVI.

What do you mean by performance worse exactly?

Click to expand...

As to your "may not get the digital panel bar" I very much doubt that OP will but in my limited knowledge of this function I belive this to be the problem

FrankJH said:

As to your "may not get the digital panel bar" I very much doubt that OP will but in my limited knowledge of this function I belive this to be the problem

Click to expand...

You lost me there, can you expand on that a bit?

I was really only re-affirming your post and making a bad joke about the "may " part

What I meant was I would bet that those options are greyed out or non existant if you ONLY have a vga monitor connected.

If OP has one of both ( or same monitor with vga on one input and DVI on the other) then I could imagine he would then be able to "use" the ~alternative dvi mode~ check box to clear it and hopefully his problem

FrankJH said:

If OP has one of both ( or same monitor with vga on one input and DVI on the other) then I could imagine he would then be able to "use" the ~alternative dvi mode~ check box to clear it and hopefully his problem

Click to expand...

Yes, I have one monitor hooked up through DVI and VGA. I will have to try this on Monday evening when I get back to London. However, I don't remember seeing this option previously when I had the monitor hooked up this way.

On another note, Sapphire and ATI tech support have been downright awful. I have given them a wealth of information in regards to what the problem is and what I have attempted to do to fix it, and the best they can come up with is 'uninstall the drivers and install 6.4'. When I saw this is what they had suggested, I was very, very angry. I despise stupidty in any walks of life but that was almost too much.

Slight update. I can't see any settings for "alternative DVI mode" with both VGA and DVI hooked up so there's no dice there.

Following further investigation, it seems like this may be an EDID problem. There have been lots of people having similar issues with HDTV's but not monitors it seems. I think there is a conflict between what the monitor is reporting in it's EDID and what the drivers are reading. Here is a screenshot of what I am talking about:

SCREENSHOT

(Please excuse the desktop, it's yet another re-installation of Windows.)

What I am going to do now is work with ViewSonic regarding this. I will continue to work with ATI too. Hopefully I can get this sorted out soon, as it's driving me mad.