Radeon 5870HD + Mac Pro 2009 corruption

[M&M]

Hi,

I've updated my video card (Radeon 4870) on my 2009 Mac Pro this summer, and I installed the radeon 5870HD.

This happened during the Lion upgrade, so the problem that I'm experiencing is hard to assig it to Lion or the card upgrade.

Here's my problem :

Some of the screen savers even the ones from apple, they are showed with a black box around some of the animation ex: Arabesque, RSS Visualizer, Word of the Day, Lion Galaxy.

Even the application Mach Desktop show the same corruption when browsing some of the Quartz compositions.

The issue is also present in iMovie. When I browse the text effects, all of them show the black boxes and it is impossible to apply a text.

What I will try to do today is to put back the old video card to check if it is hardware related. If that's the case, I know that I will try to get my card fixed or replaced.

If the issue still present after swapping the cards, I don't know what can cause this issue.

That's why I post now here my issue, if one of you may have experienced a similar case your help will be very welcome.

I don't want to reinstall Lion and I did created a new account to check if the problem is user related or not and the new user created had the same issue.

So I just hope it is hardware (video card only) related.

But please if you have a hint to share please do it.

Thanks for your help in advance.

I will try to post some screen captures of the corruptions later this afternoon.

 

[M&M]

Hi,
I will try to post some screen captures of the corruptions later this afternoon.

I just updated the screen captures of some of the graphic corruptions that I encountered.

 

[Cindori]

Bad card.

 

[M&M]

You are mistaken

Bad card.

Sorry Cindori, your prediction is mistaken.

I replaced the 5870HD card with the 4870HD and the same corruption still present.

I decided to use a new hard drive and install a clean copy of Lion. After 30 minutes all was working fine. The corruption disappeared.

I made the switch again for the 5870HD and the system still working flawlessly. So I decided to use the Migration assistant to get everything back to this new image of Lion but after 20 minutes and a restart... the corruption came back.

So I now know that the problem is not hardware, so who's the culprit?

I have no idea how to fix this and I don't know where to begin.

Anybody can get me a direction to look at?

Thanks

 

[derbothaus]

Keep the clean build and migrate files by hand. DO NOT MIGRATE SYSTEM PREFS and outside of browser bookmarks, do not migrate all your local prefs.
Probably some kind of OpenGL corruption. You could run plutil against some important prefs if you do not want to recreate everything.

 

[M&M]

Thanks, I'll try to do this see if I can find the culprit app...

 

[M&M]

I found the trouble maker.

I've uninstalled two plug-ins from Boris FX and now I have all my quartz effects working fine (screen savers and iMovie).

No need to reinstall everything.

 

[derbothaus]

That's great. Happy computing.