File window content disappears in CS4

[Nick_...@adobeforums.com]

In addition to the lag time when dragging windows around, that's being discussed in other threads, I'm having another problem. With an open file, if I drag it to a new position, the content of the picture disappears, showing only the desktop underneath. Example here:

<http://www.nickdeckerphoto.com/stuff/ps_screengrab.jpg>

If I click on it with any tool, the content comes back. Drag it again and the content disappears.

Of course, if I turn off OpenGL features in prefs, the behavior goes away (as do all of the cool features like continuous zoom, sharp at all zoom percentages, etc.).

Vid car is ATI Radeon X1950 Pro with newest drivers.

[Chri...@adobeforums.com]

Contact ATI, they still have bugs to fix for your card.

[Nick_...@adobeforums.com]

I have contacted ATI, and will do so again. As a friend mentioned to me, though, and I agree, ATI Support is an oxymoron.

[Rob_K...@adobeforums.com]

What I don't understand with all those drivers not being up to date yet: what was ps been alpha an beta tested with?

Rob

[Nick_...@adobeforums.com]

Good question, Rob.

[Chri...@adobeforums.com]

Rob - we have been working closely with the video card manufacturers. In some cases we have prerelease drivers. In other cases we had to test with other card models because the drivers were not ready yet.

[Acro...@adobeforums.com]

Stone:
wacom intuos3 driver 6.1.0.5 (current)
nvidia gts8800/512 driver 178.24 (g92, 6 months old)
nvidia gts8800/320 driver 178.24 (reasonably current)

Bird one:
Just wondering, how is it (is it?) that these would not work correctly? what did the beta testers have, and how did they get these drivers way back then if we can't get them here and now? Same question as already asked, only a little bit more precise.

Bird two:
And I hate to bring this up, but where do all these people get a trial version if adobe.com doesn't have any to download?

If amazon truly did get it out, I will find out in a day if these problems are as bad as I have been led to ... imagine (so far).

[Nick_...@adobeforums.com]

Chris, I have updated my support ticket with ATI with a link to this thread. It will be interesting to hear what, if anything, they have to say.

[Nick_...@adobeforums.com]

Here's the latest response from ATI support concerning my problem:

"Drivers are only optimized for applications such as Adobe CS 4 on the FireGL products.

Radeon based products do not have any special optimizaions for CAD/Design software.

What is being worked on in in future driver releases is never announced ahead of time, information on updates is only available when the driver is published online through the release notes posted at the same time.

I would recommend checking for updates for both the motherboard BIOS and chipset drivers from the motherboard manufacturer to see if they help any with the redraw issues."

What a crock.

[Bart_...@adobeforums.com]

I hate ATI, their support really sucks. I had to get a V5200 FireGL replaced and now the replacement makes a really expensive paper weight.

[Nick_...@adobeforums.com]

Bart,

Yup, and all of the FireGL cards are PCI-E cards. My mobo only accepts AGP cards, so now I'm looking around ebay to find a (discontinued) socket 939 mobo that offers PCI-E slots, so I can buy a PCI-E graphics card that'll work.

Then I can reinstall everything. What fun!

[Chri...@adobeforums.com]

Acro - we don't know what's going on with the drivers. Sometimes we were testing with beta drivers (due to bug fixes), but mostly we tested with production drivers. We're working hard to track down the problems and working directly with several customers to resolve them quickly.

As for the trials - someone found the URL to trial files, which might or might not be the real trial downloads (might be out of date).

[Nick_...@adobeforums.com]

We're working hard to track down the problems and working directly with
several customers to resolve them quickly.

Chris, does that mean you're working hard to solve the problem that is the subject of this thread? I hope so. If you need another tester, please let me know.

nick at nickdeckerphoto dot com

Thanks,
Nick

[Chri...@adobeforums.com]

Nick - we haven't seen the problem mentioned in this thread.
Someone who has seen it needs to contact the video card maker so they can get enough details to find the cause of the problem.

[Nick_...@adobeforums.com]

Chris, I have contacted them and they've been no help whatsoever.

Can you, or someone else at Adobe, tell me what ATI driver version(s) were used in testing CS4? I'm wondering if rolling back to a previous version (from 8.10) might help.

Thanks.

[Chri...@adobeforums.com]

Nick - we have a few hundred video cards used to test Photoshop.
But we do not have YOUR system.

I don't know the cause, I don't know what will fix it.
But I am pretty sure that the cause is related to the video card driver or some external factor.

[Nick_...@adobeforums.com]

Chris - OK, you do not have my system. But, you surely kept some kind of record about which drivers were used to test ATI cards. That's all I'm asking for. Again, my card is the Radeon ATI X1950 Pro. I see that the X1900 Pro is on the approved list, so maybe you could just tell me what you used for that one.

Nick

[Chri...@adobeforums.com]

We went through many drivers as the vendors fixed bugs in the drivers. Mostly we tested on the latest drivers for each card.

[Nick_...@adobeforums.com]

Mostly we tested on the latest drivers for each card.

OK, just tell me the date. I'll take it from there!

I know this is a user to user forum, but I also know that you're an Adobe software engineer. As such, I would suggest that you are able to know (and tell me) which drivers were used to test ATI Radeon cards. I'm not asking you to give up privileged information, I just want the software that Adobe sold me to work.

I would add that when I bought CS4, I saw nothing about a list of tested video cards in the minimum system requirements. I watched a long podcast on the launch of the whole Creative Suite. A great marketing tool, to be sure, but they said nothing about what cards were tested to make sure that PS CS4 was compatible with MY system. If you (Adobe) had access to drivers that worked, I'd like to know the version. That's all I'm asking.

[Chri...@adobeforums.com]

Nick - Get The Latest Driver. That's the best we can tell you.

Video cards are not on the minimum requirements -- all we require is a working card.
And we already publish suggested cards for best performance.

If your card and drivers are working, then Photoshop should be working just fine - as it is for many other people.

[Glen...@adobeforums.com]

I am very much with Nick on this.

Chris, you are constantly telling those of us experiencing serious display problems while using Adobe-Approved cards to update our GPU Driver to the latest available, which we do without (in many cases) the problems being resolved.

I am struggling to make sense of your position: on the one hand you maintain that it's the incompetence of even the latest drivers which is preventing v.11 from performing properly with (some?) approved cards; while on the other you say these same cards a) have worked successfully in your testing and b) seemingly work successfully now for other users?

It must follow that there are known Drivers which did and do interpret and implement your code successfully with these Cards; and that we with the ReDraw problems are not using them.

If we were told which these successful drivers happen to be we could at least then establish whether or not we need to be looking elsewhere for a cause of these debilitating problems.

[Chri...@adobeforums.com]

Glenn - yes, I am telling you to update the driver because most of the bugs are in the drivers. If the driver does not fix the bug, then you need to follow up with the video card vendor because they may not have updated the driver for your model and OS yet.

Driver bugs can be hardware and OS dependent, and we have seen some video card firmware bugs as well (updates are normally in the driver or posted with the drivers).

No, it does not follow that there are known good drivers and cards -- because we could not test the drivers and cards on your exact system. The same card and driver version might work on vista on and Intel Core2 system, and fail on Vista for a Pentium4 system, or XPSP3, or XPSP2, or if you have a certain game installed, or a certain utility installed, or while running a certain screensaver, or ......

On a large sampling of Windows systems, with a large sampling of video cards (current, recent, and some ancient), on clean and dirty (lots of apps, lots of history) systems, with AMD and Intel CPUs, with a variety of motherboards and chipsets -- Photoshop CS4 worked without a problem.

But again, just because a model of video card and version of driver work on my systems, don't mean that they will work correctly on your system.

[Glen...@adobeforums.com]

Chris, thanks for the considerate response. Truly appreciated.

I’ve never doubted for a moment that Photoshop is thoroughly and extensively tested, nor that v.11 is working perfectly well on many machines of all colours and all sizes…

Which is why I – and I’m sure I’m not alone in this – naturally look first to what it is about my own machine/s that this release of Photoshop does not like.

Not easy, because a system that’s reasonably well maintained and managed and which runs several not-undemanding apps – including Photoshop 10 as well as 3D modelling, editing and rendering software – with no problem at all must have something very specially wrong to keep Photoshop 11 alone from behaving as it should.

Incompatibility is never one-sided. The frustration felt this end is knowing that no matter what I (or other sufferers) do to amend our systems, it seems likely that if there's some sort of susceptibility to communication failure between your code and certain system configurations, then any solution – be it in the hands of Adobe or Nvidia, ATI, Dell, HP or whoever – is wholly beyond our control.

But it certainly seems from other threads you and others are working really hard your end at getting this solved – whatever it is! – so for me at least I’m thinking patience now must be the name of the game…

If it’s of any use to you, I’ve charted here <http://www.gmingham.co.uk/Tech/Photoshop_v11_Symptoms.html> (bit crudely) the occurence of symptoms experienced on my machines…

[Chri...@adobeforums.com]

Glenn - thanks for the chart.

[BJNicholls]

For the record, the list of Adobe tested cards doesn't list specific hardware, it's a list of card types by chipset. For each "card" listed, we users are looking at several card manufacturers and sometimes different clock speeds among other variables. And there's nothing quantitative said about testing. We can assume the cards work, but at what level of feature support and for which specific products? I'm sure Adobe doesn't want to endorse hardware, but if ATI and nvidia are CS4-optimizing drivers only for FireGL and the Quadro series respectively, that information would be very helpful.