Attack of the Pixels
Quixotry
Posts: 912
I don't know what to call this problem. I used to get it on my iMac and now it's happening on my new computer as well. Daz Studio 4.9 will be working just fine, then suddenly large portions of my window are taken over by multicolored pixels and ther will be distortion appearing at random around the window. Everything still works, though there's occasional lag, and it renders just fine. I thought this was caused by a problem with my old iMac, but since it's followed me onto a new computer I don't know what to think. Has anyone had anything like this happen while working in Daz Studio?
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Hi, Mary. What are the specifications of your new computer, including the operating system? That will help determine the problem. Did you re-purpose/reuse anything from the old iMac?
That sort of random pixelization could be caused by a number of things. The first suspect, and the easiest to remedy, would be graphics drivers. But it could be caused by hardware problems as well - a defective video card, an overheating video card, a defective or loose monitor cable, etc. With more information, we should be able to isolate it.
Hi SixDs. Thanks for offering to help.
I'm using a mid 2010 Mac Pro. I've attached a picture with the specifications. Everything in the Mac Pro is new as of a few days ago. With the iMac, I kept my Daz Library on an external 1TB drive and all I've done with the Mac Pro so far is install Daz Studio, then connect my external drive and tell DS where to find the content. I do plan to copy the contents of the external drive to an internal hard drive, but haven't done it yet. Does any of that information help us?
Presumably that isn't the original GPU since 980Tis are considerably newer than 2010?
Apple never shipped any Mac with a Nvidia 9xx so Apple never designed drivers for that chipset. The support for that card might have to come from outside of Apple since Apple developers. If you bought a flashed card from a vendor contact the vendor for drivers they developed as standard drivers will not work for a flashed card. If you used a non-flashed card then Nvidia offers some support for Mac Pro's with Nvidia cards that were not shipped with the Mac Pro's but your card is not among the ones listed for 10.11 and if your card was flashed then all bets are off.
Another possibility is to first backup with Time Machine or Carbon Copy Cloner then upgrade to OS 10.12.3 from the App Store which would have the most recent drivers from Apple but again since Apple never had a system with a 9xx it's a shot in the dark.
A third one; install and boot to Windows from bootcamp. Just make sure your computer has cootie shots before you start browsing the web in IE.
No, the original card was a Radeon 5770. I changed the card out because the original was older and after doing a lot of research abd checking with three different people who restore and upgrade Mac Pros professionally, I went with this card. Those three Mac guys (all from different companies so they weren't just agreeing with each other to make a sale) assured me that the 980 Ti would work smoothly in this computer with the appropriate drivers.
This is a flashed card, yes. I know other Mac Pro users have installed these cards flashed and had no trouble, which is why my first assumption is that it's something I've done or not done that's causing the glitch. Maybe it is the card - I can talk to the vendor and see if I can get another. The vendor provided me with drivers for 10.11, and that's what I installed. It's using NVIDIA Web Driver: 346.03.15f06 http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/114670/en-us (and, no, the 980 isn't listed under the supported products. This is the driver provided by the vendor, though) and CUDA Driver Version 8.0.63. But it worked perfectly for three days, rendered scenes like lightning (1 minute and 45 seconds compared to the same scene taking 14+ hours on the iMac) and there were no pixel attacks. It's just been yesterday and today. I don't suppose changing monitors could have had this effect? That's the only other thing that I've done is replace my old apple cinema display with a bigger Dell monitor.
I could try 10.12 without losing anything - all my work stuff is still on the iMac and the Time Machine backup. I hesitate to do that, though, simply because I use software for work that is technically supported by Apple on Sierra, but according to the user forums, doesn't work very well on that system. So I'd rather stay in 10.11 if possible. Might try 10.12 just out of curiosity if all else fails here, though. I can always drop back to 10.11, but it's a bit of a hassle.
Also, I don't have access to a copy of Windows, so while that's a promising idea, it's not an option at the moment.
I do wonder if it's not the graphics card, though, since the same problem shows up on my iMac (10.11) and that's an entirely different card. Could it be something about DS 4.9 in 10.11, maybe?