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Display tearing issues in CS6
(cross-posted to Adobe Forums – apologies to those who read both)
Hi all,
I’m experiencing some wierd display tearing issues in After Effects CS 6.
Anything which moves moderately quickly in the composition window during playback or interaction experiences severe horizontal image tearing.
Video playback is tearing, regardless of resolution size (full, quarter, etc.). The display tears EVEN when I am simply dragging stuff around. I could be holding down space and dragging the canvas around in my composition window, or just dragging a footage element and I’ll see a ton of really severe, jagged tearing.
It definitely looks like a monitor refresh rate issue, but I’ve never experienced anything like it before on this system.
Turning off hardware acceleration for composition, layer and footage has not helped. I have also restarted numerous times after changing this setting.
I am running a MacPro 2.66 GHz Quad-Core, OS X 10.7.3
16 gb ram
Card: ATI Radeon HD 4870 512 MBMy graphics card is admitedly not a supported card, but it has always worked fine in CS 5.5, and I would imagine that it would simply be ignored when I have turned off hardware acceleration, and it is not supported to begin with. I have had NO issues in any other version of AE, or in any other applications including FCP, Photoshop, etc.
I have two monitors on this machine, both standard computer displays and not broadcast, blackmagic, firewire or anything like that. One is an Apple monitor, and the other Samsung. One is connected via mini-display port adaptor.
This issue occurs on either monitor.
Any advice? Thanks so much!
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12 Replies
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CS6, AE in particular, takes a toll on your card. If it worked fine in CS5 it does not imply it will work in CS6- you need a card with more memory if you want to run CS6 without the issues you are experiencing.
Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist -
[Perry Kroll] “My graphics card is admitedly not a supported card”
This is an incorrect statement that I assume will be often repeated for the next few months. I am sure that you are referring to ray-traced supported GPUs which is the case, for ATI cards, at least for now.
It is true that your card doesn’t support ray-tracing but it is incorrect to say that your GPU is not supported by AE CS6 – at least not without first checking that you have the latest drivers for your GPU. FWIW, even with OpenGL 1.5, you should similar experience with CS6 as you did with CS5.5 – at least that’s the theory.
There are, other, GPU acceleration features that kick in, in other areas of CS6, such as drawing AE’s UI and the new Fast Draw comp preview. Further, the fact that you have access to the Hardware Acceleration switch means that you have OpenGL 2.0 supported by your GPU.
You are very likely (at least let’s hope it is) experiencing an issue with an older GPU driver. Ensure that you have the latest driver from ATI.
HTH
RoRKIntensive AE & Mocha Training in Singapore and Malaysia
Adobe ACE/ACI (version 7) & Imagineer Systems Inc Approved Mocha Trainer -
That makes sense, Roland… but unless I am mistaken, on Mac OS X Lion it impossible for me to find a graphics card driver update. ATI doesn’t seem to offer any for Mac. Am I missing something there? I’ve hunted around for one without luck.
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Ted, this is certainly believable, but do you know for sure if this is the case? Have you found othrer references to this or to AE CS6 being a more GPU-demanding application? I just want to make sure there isn’t some more fundamentally messed up part of my setup before I apply the cash :p
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It’s best to check the ATI site for driver updates. It’s strange and unfortunate if ATI doesn’t provide driver updates. BTW, can you check if you have similar issues if you set yourself up to a single monitor?
A two-monitor setup adds extra burden to the GPU. In this case, my thoughts are that there is insufficient on-board memory to work efficiently with AE CS6, with a two-monitor set up, with your GPU.
I should add that there may be cards out there that are incompatible with AE CS6 but these are really old cards, manufactured more than 5 years ago – essentially, the lowest common denominator benchmark for GPUs to work with AE is their support for OpenGL 1.5.
HTH
RoRKIntensive AE & Mocha Training in Singapore and Malaysia
Adobe ACE/ACI (version 7) & Imagineer Systems Inc Approved Mocha Trainer -
Hi Roland,
I have tested with one monitor unplugged (restarted the system after unplugging, for good measure) and the problem is still there.
I’ve also searched the ATI website, and they do not seem to offer Mac drivers for the ATI Radeon HD line…
Anyone know if there is a way to get a driver update?
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Perry, google “ati radeon hd 4870 doanload driver mac” – I got lots of hits. Ensure that you check your existing driver version with the one that you download.
Good Luck!
RoRKIntensive AE & Mocha Training in Singapore and Malaysia
Adobe ACE/ACI (version 7) & Imagineer Systems Inc Approved Mocha Trainer -
I’m not having any luck finding a driver that way. Afaik they are built into OS X and very rarely updated outside of that. The ATI driver search tool does not list any drivers for my gpu / OS. It does list updates for my gpu on other platforms like Windows. All of those google links don’t really lead anywhere either.
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That kinda sucks! I can only think of heading to the Mac-centric sites to get better/more info.
Good Luck
RoRKIntensive AE & Mocha Training in Singapore and Malaysia
Adobe ACE/ACI (version 7) & Imagineer Systems Inc Approved Mocha Trainer -
We’ve isolated the problem to an issue with how Mac OS deals with vertical sync and OpenGL. We are working on a fix.
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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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