Primary display corrupts when watching YouTube videos.

I originally posted this elsewhere but have yet to receive a reply, so I'm going to do a direct copy/paste, hence there being another post compressed into this one at the bottom.

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I'm not sure whether this is down to a driver update, a Windows update or something else. It's been happening for about a week, and happens after a few hours on both 13.4 WHQL & 13.5 beta2 (yes -- I've tried uninstalling drivers and reinstalling, etc). Curiously, reinstalling the drivers does appear to delay the issue's reappearance.

My card is an XFX 7950.

Here's is what I'm talking about:



It happens irrespective of whether I'm overclocked, at stock clocks or underclocked. My temperature (idle) is about 50C.

If I disconnect the first monitor, the second monitor inherits the corruption immediately, and vice-versa.

This happens on both Chrome and a clean Firefox installation.

This only appears to happen when watching YouTube videos. Heavy gaming does not produce similar problems.

Closing the window with YouTube open usually solves the issue, however not always.

The only potentially relevant software I've installed in the last week is an Adobe Flash Player update, however I think this was after the problem first arose.

The only Windows update I've installed in the past week was a security update (KB2840149).

What on earth is at fault here? This is such a peculiar problem.

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Was just doing some more testing with Nightly (Firefox) and it gave me a BSOD.

My current assumption is that this is a flash player/video card driver conflict, so I'm trying to disable flash hardware acceleration. The option under control panel -> screen resolution -> advanced -> troubleshoot is greyed out.

Edit: Completely uninstalled flash player, still happening. Going to try uninstalling the video card drivers and then reinstalling them bar the bit about video decoding/hardware acceleration/whatever AMD calls it.

Edit: Currently have 13.4 display driver + catalyst installed but nothing else from the driver options. No flash player. Currently no problems, will stay like this for a few hours and see how it goes.

Edit: Still managed to corrupt. Going to try the above again but for 13.1 where it didn't see any issues.

Edit: Uninstalled using Atiman, installed 13.1, still happens. What the deuce? Anyone, help?

Edit: Tried a system restore to three days ago, no dice.

Faladu said:

Does that happen with ANYTHING else?

I'd try loading a Linux LiveCD and use youtube there, Linux Mint 14 comes with Firefox 16.0.2.
LiveCD has the installer, but you actively boot into Linux Mint with it and can play with it, and install or not, and I know Flash is active there too.

I don't think so. It may have happened with VLC Media Player previously but I'm not sure. At the very least VLC seems stable now. It hasn't happened with any games which leads me to believe that the problem is related to hardware acceleration for video playback.

I'll give your suggestion a try :)

YouTube works fine on Mint, bar a lack of audio (probably just a lack of drivers).

It also works fine on Windows with all AMD drivers uninstalled.

This is interesting. Windows is fine with YouTube, but as soon as I install some AMD drivers I get the issue above or worse yet a BSoD. I got a memory dump from the blue screen and have the debugging tools installed, and am investigating. This bit has peaked my curiosity:

Probably caused by : atikmpag.sys ( atikmpag+8db8 )

And I'm back once more.

I've formatted the entire drive and installed Windows 8. I've replaced the video card (something I was planning to do anyway). I've reset my CPU's overclock.

And still - still I get this bloody problem as soon as there is some sort of hardware accelerated video playback.

My assumption now is back to it being a driver issue, however given the steps I took on my old OS to test older drivers I'm thinking it may not be the video card drivers. Anyone have any idea at all what the problem could be?

Edit: I'm considering that it may be the fact that one of my monitors is at 144Hz. Here's something somewhat related from the Catalyst 10.9 release notes: "Desktop corruption no longer occurs during PowerDVD SD/Blu-ray content playback on 120Hz displays." There are also some options for reducing DVI corruption in CCC.

Edit: Hur-freaking-rah! Lowering the refresh rate down to 60Hz seems to solve the issue, meaning that the issue was most likely something related to DVI corruption due to bandwidth constraints.

Edit: 120Hz also seems fine.

Edit: 144Hz immediately brings with it the issue above. Well, at least we appear to have figured out the issue!