Comments on: ATI Radeon X1900 XT and Mac Pro sparkling/dancing artifacts

By: Peter

Peter — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 01:36:55 +0000

I’ve got it, too. Mac Book Pro with an Apple Cinema Display. I get it in the black areas of certain web pages! Close the web page, it’s gone! BTW - This page does not. But XMRadio.com does. Really Odd.

By: Nicolas

Nicolas — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 09:58:24 +0000

hi, I would just like to say I have a pc with an ati X1650 installed. And guess what, I too have a graphics issue with sparklies, however, when the pc boots up (XP pro) the sparklies are dancing at 120 beats per minute! And after boot up I get artifacts like static dots presented on the screen (on the desktop and in programs like Internet Explorer). These dots don't dance about tho, they only do that at boot up! I have looked around but found not a single fix for this issue. It definitely is either a bug with ati drivers or in my case a problem with Direct X 9 although it is unclear. I tested the Dx9 drivers and there didn't seem to be a problem. like many of the people here, I updated drivers but still no luck. It is difficult to know which vendor is responsible for this, however, as you are using a Mac and me a Pc it seems unlikely to be the fault of Operating systems and definitely a DRIVER issue.

Have you obtained a fix for this yet? and how?

By: Lane

Lane — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 17:35:17 +0000

I have the Early 2008 2.8GHz Quad Core and the X1900XT Mac Radeon Upgrade kit off ebay and it produces the same thing, the guy I bought it from said it came out of a Tiger System and no problems, so it definately is a bug that either Apple or ATI need to address, also is this card the X1900XT better than the HD 2600? which would game better, the one with the most ram wins or not necessarily…?

Thanks, Lane pls email any suggestions comments to lanejasper69@msn.com

By: Anders

Anders — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 10:25:00 +0000

I had the exact same problem with my new Mac pro 2008 model with the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT video card. In my case, the problem displayed itself on the main monitor, then the video adapter was connected to port 2 (to rule out grounding effects theories, the problem remained even if no equipment was connected to the video card).

Well, after a bunch of calls to Apple support, they finally sent me a replacement card and the problem went away.

By: Anthony

Anthony — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 11:48:53 +0000

was googleling LCD sparkles and found your blogâ€¦ I have had the same issue since I installed Leopard a few months back. I get these randon linear artifacts appearing in Photoshop… Quark… Firefox… I hide and show and it disappears and reappears again… I have a 30″ ACD and have reported this to Apple using my Apple Care Warranty and with no satisfaction over the phone… I also brought it to a local Apple Care acredited repair shop with no solution from them either. They just said I’m covered for three years so if it gets any worse Apple will sort you out…. but I’m not sooo sure after reading this thread… so many people with the same problem but no solutions. I even thought the recent Graphics Udpdate 1.0 given with 10.5.2 would sort the problem… but after some small investigation I found that the X1900 drivers weren’t even included in the update. The ATI website only supports driver updates for G5 and 10.4… anyone know if a 10.5 update is due…?? Or if anyone has had any luck with ATI even acknowledging the issue… I love my Mac… love my 30″ ACD… and it’s such a pity that we all have to work on with this issue after paying so much money and being so loyal as always to the Apple Brand.

Yours sincerely Anthony

Irish MacUser and MacAddict

By: geekraver

geekraver — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 08:15:59 +0000

I see these with a Radeon X1600GT on my PC. First I thought I had stuck pixels and blamed my monitor, but I just upgraded the PC to a Nvidia 8600 and now the monitor is fine. Meanwhile I moved the ATI card to my Vista media center and now I have dancing pixels on my LCD TV.

So I definitely think it's an ATI card issue.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 23:12:46 +0000

I’m getting strange coloured sparkling artifiacts too, but I’m on a G5 Powermac with an AGP ATI 9600XT video card. A reboot seemed to fix the problem for a short while, but then it progressively comes back. I wonder if it’s the GPU overheating? Perhaps Leopard is working the GPU harder than Tiger did?

By: Tom

Tom — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 15:40:13 +0000

Im havening the same issue. Its related to colors for sure. Seems to be intermittent. Come up after I play WOW.

Running on a MacPro with the x1900 and a Dell 3007wfp

By: PopZen

PopZen — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 17:48:05 +0000

I have started to experience this same problem - after installing Leopard and upgrading the RadeonX1900 firmware from last week. I have 2 30″ cinema displays both set at millions of colors and the highest resolution. Clearly something in Leopard (in my opinion) has pushed the graphics processing needed to display the windows over the edge. I can generally get the screen back to normal (by dragging the window to the other screen and back) but it is becoming quite annoying…

By: Jaffey8984

Jaffey8984 — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:25:57 +0000

was googleling LCD sparkles and found your blog… have the same problem but i’m a PC user…. however I too have an ATI card.I have a 19″ wide screen monitor. The sparkles will appear in a random place in an image, however if i move the image around, it moves with the image. for me, however, if i lower my resolution to 1280×1084 or lower, the sparkles seems to go away. Grant it I have not tested this over any period of time. Just sharing my frustration I guess. I have an ATI X1300 pro but am gettign an HD2900xt in this week. I have always been a proud ATI owner, hope it gets fixed. Anyway, if i have anylucj with the HD2900 i’ll drop another note for what it’s worth. (Also my sparkles almost always appear in the darker parts of the screen.)