Interesting Graphics Issue.

Howdy.
I've been running 7 for a while with no real issue except for a somewhat annoying bug that seems to be causing some kind of grief with desktop graphics.

Imagine the scenario; you boot up your computer, arrive at your desktop and decide you want to check your emails. You open up your browser, or email program and check your emails. No big deal. You now decide you'll leave your emails open and execute iTunes, WMP or play a game, great! 7 does it fast and doesn't beat about it. After a little while you're tired of your music or game and you decide to exit, on exit you discover you open window of your emails is completely corrupted, with stretched text, misplaced items or, completely unreadable.

Well this is what I have been experiencing from almost the beta versions. Now I am technically minded and have done a lot of testing on my hardware to be sure nothing is going ape with my graphics card. Games run fine, no artifacts or corruption.

The image attached shows what kind of unusual issue i am encountering. My first thought is nVidia's drivers. But there have been subsequent releases and bug fixes to iron out these bumps. I was wondering if anyone else has been encountering this kind of behavior. My graphics work fine under Vista, XP and Ubuntu, i've even run the win7 drivers in Vista and that was fine. So I'm thinking this could have something to do with WDM, because the same behavior can be induced if a window, overlapping another is closed or minimized.

No biggie, I'm just interested to see if anyone else has been getting this issue.

What kind of display card do you have? I have Windows 7 on my home laptop and work laptop.

I have this problem with my home laptop (Intel Express 4 Mobile) but my work laptop has an Nvidia quatro and no problems at all.

Thanks for the warm welcome Brink.

I've tried the older archived drivers on nVidia's website, but they don't improve the issue. I have read in other places on this and other forums of people experiencing lines or corruption in the title bar but not the window itself, which intrigued me to find out if other people have experienced the oddity. Both beta builds and the official 7100 RC both produce this issue. One could claim that the hardware is at fault, but this is not the case because a 3D environment performs flawlessly, diagnostics pass and older OS's don't reproduce it. I read somewhere that in 7 Microsoft coded the OS to use the power of new GFX cards to render the Areo environment in real-time thus putting less load on the CPU and RAM. It is DWM that creates the Areo experience, so i can only assume there is a bug or flaw in that module of the OS that causes this problem, word has it that its also affecting (in more subtle ways) ATI cards, and as Gprimr1 Intel integrated graphics too.

@ Gprimr1, I have an nVidia GTX 280, 1 GB; I've had these odd issues since the early betas, again Games or graphic intensive apps such as 3DS work without error, both in Open GL and DirectX

Webadict said:

I would think you can test that theory by turning off Aero.

Hope this helps

Scott

Funny you should mention that; I have had Areo off since making my last post; it suddenly dawned on me to try something new and turn Areo off. No more window corruption, not yet at least. Still early to tell, i have yet to run any games; but minimizing or maximizing windows over others doesn't trigger the issue...

Hah! Fantastic! I hadn't, no. Seeing as they were only just release today; I didn't have a clue there were new beta drivers. Will install, and report back! Gimme a mo. I'll be intrigued if this fixes or at least makes the issue less prevalent because cards or integrated graphics from other vendors appear to have an issue that mimics the one i have.