Aero and ATI Catalyst?

trenzterra said:

Hi all,

I recently changed my gfx card from a 7900GS to a HD 4870. However, one annoying problem I have been experiencing is with regards to Aero on Windows 7.

I noticed that when running certain programs, such as Firefox in particular, sometimes when I try to click a dropdown box or just access a menu very quickly, before the menu appears, there is a black thing appearing behind it for a split second, before it finally appears (i.e. something similar when you try to resize the services.msc window). This is especially apparent when I am multitasking, perhaps due to lag.

However, I did not get this problem with my 7900 GS before. I tried a reformat already but no use.

Today, I decided to install Windows Vista on another separate hard disk. I noticed that this problem does not occur in Vista.

I am using Catalyst 9.9 on both Vista and Win7. However, the problems with Aero only occurs on Windows 7 but not on Vista.

Does anyone have the same problem with ATI cards as well? Is this a driver issue due to the WDDM 1.1 model used in Win7 for Aero?

I wouldn't be surprised if this is a catalyst bug.
It wouldn't be the first time this year they introduce new bugs.

Try the 9.6, 9.7 and 9.8 and see if any of those solves it.

Always uninstall the current driver first.

Good luck

I think maybe you have misread my question. My problem is something like the one here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=494222

I did some further testing, and as it turns out, with older drivers that do not support WDDM 1.1, I do not have this problem.

I rolled back to the Catalyst 8.12 drivers and it ran like a dream, but of course I had to revert back to 9.9 since I wanted to play the latest games.

My question is, what could have changed in WDDM 1.1 to cause such a problem? Also, can I now confirm that the problem lies with the driver and not the hardware itself?

BTW can you guys run dxdiag and tell me what your WDDM version number shows? Thanks!

trenzterra said:

I think maybe you have misread my question. My problem is something like the one here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=494222

I did some further testing, and as it turns out, with older drivers that do not support WDDM 1.1, I do not have this problem.

I rolled back to the Catalyst 8.12 drivers and it ran like a dream, but of course I had to revert back to 9.9 since I wanted to play the latest games.

My question is, what could have changed in WDDM 1.1 to cause such a problem? Also, can I now confirm that the problem lies with the driver and not the hardware itself?

BTW can you guys run dxdiag and tell me what your WDDM version number shows? Thanks!

Why 8.12 ??? It's very old.

Try your way down from 9,8, 9.7, 9.6 and so on until you find one that works for you.

It's too bad that only three of the people posting in that Mozilla link actually said anything about what video card they have; two were ATI and one was Nvidia.

You using any themes other than the Firefox default? Tried Firefox in safe mode (from the Start menu) to see if it happens with no extensions or customizations loaded?

Not that it helps resolve your issue, but I have sued nothing but Firefox and an ATI card since using 7, and have never had the issue you are describing.

The problem is more apparent for me considering that I have over a thousand bookmarks and I think installing the Flash plug-in seems to aggravate it further.

Well I used the default WDDM drivers that came with Win 7 RTM and it didn't solve the problem too. So I reverted to 8.12 since it was one of the last few drivers that didnt have the new WDDM model.

Yeah I agree this is a very weird problem. I don't know whether its really an ATI problem or not, since I believe WDDM 1.1 requires DX10 cards which my old card does not support?

BTW, it seems that perhaps Firefox's window drawing model is the problem? I have no such problems in every other app. In Windows Explorer, the most I see is a slight flicker in the Address Bar dropdown box whenever new suggestions are shown, but never the black boxes thingy.

The problem is that it occurs too quickly that the FPS on video is too slow to record it.

Basically, the effect is something similar to this:

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ay-gqx18UTM"]YouTube - Windows 7 GUI slowness[/ame]

See around 0:20 of the video.

Yep, I know, but the effect I'm getting in Firefox is rather similar, although not as severe.