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b.lam

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 5, 2010
60
27
Hello fellow MacPro owners,

Since yesterday I'm having graphic glitches when moving windows around, animations are no longer smooth (e.g mission control), Mission Control previews look garbled and WoW caps at 20fps instead of 60fps with the graphic card fans running at 100%. If I take a screenshot, the effect is not visible. Therefore I took a picture using my phone:

IMG_0119.JPG

The big question: has anyone ever seen something like this? Could it mean that the card is about to go into the electronics heaven?

My graphic card is a Gainward GTX 960 4GB Phantom R (non-EFI), bought in 2015. The machine itself is a 5,1 from 2010 with the 3.2GHz quad-core, 16GB RAM, 2 SATA SSDs (High Sierra 10.13.6 & Win 10), latest NVidia WebDriver.

What happened yesterday: I had to start Win10, and due to the fact that neither BootChamp nor Boot Manager were able to successfully restart in windows (that's another topic I don't want to go into details in this thread) I had to put my old 5870 Mac Edition back in to get to the bootscreen. While the card was already in, I decided to also do the BootROM updates (via MP51.089.B00 to 138.0.0.0.0). I didn't do the Mojave upgrade due to missing NVidia drivers, so I just triggered the BootROM upgrade from the installer.

I'm not sure if I have physically broken something while shuffling the cards. The card looks OK and it is not the first time i switched the cards. Maybe some defect from static electricity? Not sure. But it is still correctly detected, so it is not completely broken.

What I tried so far: zapped PRAM, reinstalled the WebDrivers, reinstalled 10.13.6 (over the existing installation) and then reinstalled the WebDrivers but with no success. With the 5870, everything seems to be fine. So it's definitely something to do with the card. It's strange that the effect is not visible when taking screenshots using CMD-3.

I didn't see any errors in the console related to the NVidia drivers.

Thanks for your help and suggestions!

b.lam
 
Last edited:

thornslack

macrumors 6502
Nov 16, 2013
410
165
Could just be web driver weirdness or macOS corruption. I’d test it in your windows environment to see if any issues appear there before assuming it is the card.

You can install just your windows ssd to boot to that if you have concerns about being able to boot back and forth between your OS discs.
 
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b.lam

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 5, 2010
60
27
I just pulled the macOS drive and let it boot up the Windows SSD without having to fix my boot problems first :)

The result after some stress tests of the card: everything OK in Windows... so it must be the macOS installation. Probably will have to reinstall from scratch and see how it goes. Well, it's a cloudy Sunday ;)

Update:
Just finished the reinstall, currently copying data. Looks good so far, must have been some glitch in macOS. Weird, never seen anything like this happening in 18 years on macOS
 
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