ATI 5850 flicker in PS CS4

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catmug

Weaksauce
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Jan 10, 2010
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Anyone out there with Photoshop CS4, could you please confirm a driver issue for me?

In CS4, when going into fullscreen mode (F), when using OpenGL card support, I get three flickers when changing resolution levels, or going in and out of the fullscreen mode.

It may not be a huge issue for many people, but for a graphic designer...this is big.

Anyone confirm for me? I'm running W7 64.
 
i get the same thing with some games when going from windowed to full screen on my nvidia card.. my guess is its a windows 7 thing and not the actual drivers.. also does it if im in game and click on my left monitor my right one will flicker 3 or 4 times and go back to normal.. never had it happen with the same games in windows xp.. so i figure it has something to do with the resolution detection in windows vista/7..
 
I have no issues with PS CS4 or anything in the suite. Running 5850 connected to three LP2065s, 955BE, 8 GB ram, W7 64.

I'm a designer, and can feel your pain. My old 3850 would flicker in PS and I just dumped the card.

Are you OCing that 5850?
 
The card is stock. Have not OC'd. When I turn off OpenGL accel, I have no issues. Card runs flawless in even the most demanding games, hours on end. Temps are a bit hot, but nothing worse than average, from what i hear.

thanks for the help guys.
 
Just thought of something else...could it also be my screen? DVI to U2410...
 
Well, I don't think that will make you feel better, but I have exactly the same problem and concern as your...
It's not Win7 because I had a NVIDIA card previously on the same config and absolutely no problems.
- Core i5
- P55 chipset Gigabyte Mobo
- ATI 4770
- Win7 Ultimate 64

In my case I think everything started when I plugged a second monitor. For a while I could get GPU acceleration on CS4 back when disabling the second monitor (although obviously it's not something I'd like to ...), then right now I simply can't get it to work again. Everything goes fine until I turn full screen ON...

My temperatures (both MB and CPU and GPU are all bellow 40C) and the system is perfectly stable otherwise.
I'm pretty dissapointed since this is the first ATI graphics card I've bought in a while and I bought it mainly for GPU acceleration applications (don't play anything...). I don't know about benchmarks, but it seems to me the the good old problems at ATI (mainly with unstable drivers and products) are still pretty much there.

If anyone manages to solve this problem, I'd love to hear about though...
 
danielgr said:
Well, I don't think that will make you feel better, but I have exactly the same problem and concern as your...
It's not Win7 because I had a NVIDIA card previously on the same config and absolutely no problems.
- Core i5
- P55 chipset Gigabyte Mobo
- ATI 4770
- Win7 Ultimate 64

In my case I think everything started when I plugged a second monitor. For a while I could get GPU acceleration on CS4 back when disabling the second monitor (although obviously it's not something I'd like to ...), then right now I simply can't get it to work again. Everything goes fine until I turn full screen ON...

My temperatures (both MB and CPU and GPU are all bellow 40C) and the system is perfectly stable otherwise.
I'm pretty dissapointed since this is the first ATI graphics card I've bought in a while and I bought it mainly for GPU acceleration applications (don't play anything...). I don't know about benchmarks, but it seems to me the the good old problems at ATI (mainly with unstable drivers and products) are still pretty much there.

If anyone manages to solve this problem, I'd love to hear about though...
Click to expand...
Ok, so basically I found a way to go around the problem.

I still think ATI should get this sorted out in a hopefully soon_to_come driver release.
After trying everything I could in terms of "driver cleaning and reinstalling", I simply gave up.
Then decided to connect my main screen through an HDMI cable (just for the sake of it), didn't help either.

And then, finally, I decided to try full screen on my secondary screen : it works !!!
So basically I turn my secondary screen as "primary", and now run photoshop on my big&good one which became the "secondary" one.

Of course I'm quite pissed off because I'd rather use my big&good screen as main screen, but I simply couldn't make CS4 to work properly on it with such setting.
 
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I have the same issue in cs4 64bit on win 7 with a 5850 dual screen setup. Screen will flicker going to full screen once for each different file and then that file does not flicker when cycling through screen modes. Upon closing photoshop both screens flicker one final time. It appears as if there is some extra acceleration being used for full screen. I never really use the full screen mode though as i have plenty of screen real estate (5120 x 1600).
 
I get flickering in BF2 Bad company until I disable the Catalyst A.I.

Don't know if this would be the same thing.

I figured WTH!!!! :p
 
Wenty said:
I get flickering in BF2 Bad company until I disable the Catalyst A.I.

Don't know if this would be the same thing.

I figured WTH!!!! :p
Click to expand...
Well, at least not for me. I tried virtually every single setting of the drivers (including the Catalyst A.I.) before giving up and switching my screens...
 
I have the same issue only with HD4870 with CS4-64 on W7-64. When in fullscreen mode the screen starts flickering when I interact with the canvas. Ii used to work properly with older drivers however, 9.10 or even older I believe.
 
Confirmed.

Photoshop CS4
i7 920
HIS 5850
Windows 7 64-bit

You should post this in the ATI/AMD help forum or file a bug report.
 
Can someone help me? I don't know how to post this bug...I looked all over the site. Maybe I'm blind.

Tried 10.2 today. No difference. This is ridiculous....my 8800GTS ran this just dandy?
 
might be your chance to shoot kyle a pm.. maybe he could slip it to AMD and see what they say.. ya never know.. either way ya might want to try before fermi comes out while kyle and AMD are still on first name basis..
 
wolver1ne said:
That's the one.

Disabling Aero seems to be fixing the flickering in fullscreen mode. Also, using 9.6 driver (haven't tried others yet) with Aero enabled seems to be working just fine as well. But who wants all that.

ATI really needs to sort this out. >_<
Click to expand...

I've been following this thread as I do a lot of design work in Photoshop and I've been thinking of getting a 5xxx card. It looks like there is a patch in the works in case anyone missed the updates notes from the Tom's Hardware article that LeninGHOLA linked several posts ago (and wolver1ne is referring to). Pasting the update notes below.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/2d-windows-gdi,2539-11.html#
Update (1/26/2010): With preliminary research into our 2D performance analysis, AMD reports back with the following:

Tom’s Hardware has tripped over a workload area (2D lines, etc.) that we have not optimized yet.
Until this new benchmark, we have not seen any other applications that are bottlenecked by this path, and hence have not focused on it until now.
Our initial analysis has shown that we have no hardware limitations in this area.
We now have our driver team engaged to optimize this path and will release a new driver to address this workload as soon as possible.
We have already found an easy way of increasing our performance greatly, and are now going to try and schedule this in a future Catalyst (need to code in production, validate, ensure it doesn’t break anything else, etc.).
Click to expand...
 
Eriksrocks said:
http://www.amd.com/us/CatalystCrewSurvey :)
Click to expand...
Well, I did that myself just after posting here, and provided the link to this conversation as information for them as well.

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one having this problem, gonna try Catalyst 10.2 right now, although it seems that it won't help.

I guess ATI is too busy working on their fancy DirectX11 and eyefinity or 3D stuff, and simply forgot that many people out there just want to use their graphics cards for other less fancy things...

Hope they'll fix it sooner than later...
 
I just picked up a 5850 and I use cs4 often, but I didn't know that ATI can render CS4 using their GPU? Or is this only on nvidia's gpu?
 
10.2 does not fix it.

@mickeykool
Pretty much any video card with OpenGL support can be used by Photoshop to accelerate things and provide a couple extra fancy features.
 
mickeykool said:
I just picked up a 5850 and I use cs4 often, but I didn't know that ATI can render CS4 using their GPU? Or is this only on nvidia's gpu?
Click to expand...

technically its only cuda that CS4 supports.. though i believe ATI figured out a way to make the 4k series work with it.. but since the 5k series is using all new tech they problem have to redo all the coding in the drivers to make it work in cs4 again..
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
technically its only cuda that CS4 supports.. though i believe ATI figured out a way to make the 4k series work with it.. but since the 5k series is using all new tech they problem have to redo all the coding in the drivers to make it work in cs4 again..
Click to expand...
Well, I have a 4770 card and it's not working for me. As far as CS4 is concerned, it's not a problem with the new cards but with the driver.

PS: 10.2 didn't fix it for me either...
 
danielgr said:
Well, I did that myself just after posting here, and provided the link to this conversation as information for them as well.

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one having this problem, gonna try Catalyst 10.2 right now, although it seems that it won't help.

I guess ATI is too busy working on their fancy DirectX11 and eyefinity or 3D stuff, and simply forgot that many people out there just want to use their graphics cards for other less fancy things...

Hope they'll fix it sooner than later...
Click to expand...

Thanks for doing that man. We all appreciate it. Hopefully the next driver release (or hotfix?) is a good one for us.
 
Had a similar issue with my 5770 in CS4 - running CS4 without Aero should fix it (you can set this on a per-application basis: right click on the program icon, select "Properties" then head to the "Compatibility" tab and click "Disable Desktop Composition").

However, this isn't the only issue I've had with my 5770 and productivity/design applications. In fact, it's fair to say that EVERY SINGLE productivity/design application actually runs worse on my new machine than on my outgoing workstation thanks to ATI's crappy 2D implementation.

Think about that: my Radeon 5770 performs WORSE than my ancient 7800GTX in 2D applications, the same applications that I use to actually earn a living.

The article at THG is just the tip of the iceberg. Really, this is something that I'd like to see Kyle and his colleagues hold AMD accountable for. Allow me to explain:

The ATI 5000 series is basically a perfect performer in benchmarks. Terrific 3D gaming framerates, low power usage, and so on. These cards are designed to win every single review, and directly address the benchmarks that enthusiasts base their buying decision on. And they do - sure worked on me.

Trouble is, most people don't just play 3D games and fret about their power bill. Most people - even enthusiastic/professionals/technologists like us - spend most of their time in the desktop, typing, surfing, editing, watching video. All of which are tasks at which the ATI 5000 years is basically inferior to older hardware, mostly due to poor drivers (articles about the 5000 series' mediocre video performance, lame Flash acceleration, pathetic 2D performance and so on are easy to find).

AMD has basically sold us a sports car that has fantastic 0-60 times, but no reverse gear. Or steering wheel. Or doors.

Thus, I'd love to see a page in the GPU reviews that briefly examines how new GPUs perform in basic 2D scenarios, as AMD has clearly demonstrated that we can no longer take such performance for granted.
 
try this: Menu View - Show Rulers , Then try enter in fullscreen. Work for me.
whithout aero my Cs4 slows down .
I'm very disapointed with de 2D perfomance
 
rafaeloz2 said:
try this: Menu View - Show Rulers , Then try enter in fullscreen. Work for me.
whithout aero my Cs4 slows down .
I'm very disapointed with de 2D perfomance
Click to expand...
Incredible, you are right and that's true (it works fine when enabling "rulers").
Now, how stupid can that be to force you to enable the rulers on every single photo you may be editing to be able to use GPU acceleration ...

Thanks for the tip though !
 
rafaeloz2 said:
try this: Menu View - Show Rulers , Then try enter in fullscreen. Work for me.
whithout aero my Cs4 slows down .
I'm very disapointed with de 2D perfomance
Click to expand...

I can also confirm that this workaround solves the flicker problem. How ridiculous.
 
the 10.4 driver works kind well too, not to much improvement, but worth a try.
The Cs5 works lot better than Cs4 too !
 
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