Wierd Graphics Issue

[SelfMadeCelo]

Recently I've started having this weird graphics glitch on my Alum iMac. After playing wow for a few hours and some tabbing back and forth between game and browser the graphics will suddenly freak out and look like the attached pictures. When it happens if you change desktops or use Expose sometimes the graphics will look okay and then it'll freak out again. It's not just the game graphics that are messed up either, it's the entire desktop. The first time it happened was when the screensaver was on and i moved the mouse. I just restarted the computer and it didn't happen for a few days. Then after that it started happening atleast once every other day, sometimes twice a day.

I have reset the PRAM as well and still have issues. I want to say its because of the last update because it's never happened before then, but I can't be sure.

Anybody have some ideas?

 

[r.j.s]

Call Apple.

It looks like the GPU is failing.

 

[Cave Man]

Disregard...

 

[SelfMadeCelo]

Call Apple.

It looks like the GPU is failing.

i bought this iMac about last year in Februrary, but it was off eBay. Would I still be able to purchase AppleCare? I have the receipts and everything with it.

 

[SelfMadeCelo]

Looks like the NVidia woes continue. I sure wish they'd get their act together.

It's the ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT

 

[Cave Man]

Oh - gotcha. For some reason my brain saw "Aluminum MacBook".

Carry on.

 

[Jethryn Freyman]

i bought this iMac about last year in Februrary, but it was off eBay. Would I still be able to purchase AppleCare? I have the receipts and everything with it.

Not sure, probably best to give Apple a call and find out from them. From here it definitely looks like a GPU issue, much worse than the problems with my iMac.

 

[jf8]

I doubt this is a hardware issue. I have an iMac7,1 with the Radeon HD 2600. I've experienced a very similar issue when using multiple 3D applications at once and switching between them - Cover Flow, a 3D application a VMware VM, a 3D screensaver, and others. None of these are particularly 3D intensive. I haven't had the problem reoccur since upgrading to 10.5.5 or 10.5.6 - but it's not that often that I run a combination of apps like that.

I have used a similar set of 3D applications at the same time in Windows Vista on the same machine and never experienced any graphics failures that correlated with certain tasks. (I did experience graphics failures after a week or two of uptime with older Catalyst drivers, but these stopped occuring sometime in spring 2008.)

I've also experienced GPU driver kernel panics, specifically when trying to play Civilization IV in Crossover. There have been a few 10.5 updates that specifically mention graphics driver fixes & included updated Radeon 2000-series drivers. The Radeon 2000-series OS X drivers were never really that good to begin with.