Monitor 'hourglassing' with nvidia cards/drivers

[shale00]

Hi all

I have come across an interesting problem in my work as a tech.On 3 separate occasions (with different systems)upon installing nvidia detonator drivers the display gets 'hourglassed' (the opposite of barreling(?)) whereby the sides of the display curve in at the middle about 1 cm from the sides. Its never really posible to satisfactorily fix this with the monitor OSD.
The strange thing is, upon reverting to old (pre detonator) drivers the houglassing stops...
This has happened on 3 systems using a TNT, Geforce 2 and Geforce3 2ti(my own). 2 mitsubishi monitors and a HP badged monitor.
Any ideas?

 

[Accessdabbler]

The OSD doesn't have an option for "pincushioning"?

 

[gargouille]

Maybe the systems are VERY BUSY with those drivers LOL

How do they respond to start/run/dxdiag and running the tests?

Tried fielding the question to nVidia?

 

[shale00]

Thanks accessdabbler, pincushioning was the word i was looking for.
I sent a description of the problem to Creative who make the card (Nvidia dont give support directly) and they sent the following reply which effectively tells me to rebuild the machine, but i include it for...er, interest

Reply from Creative

It is difficult to pin point the exact cause of this issue that you are
having. In order to resolve this I would recommend that you try the
following:

- In the computer's BIOS, try altering these options (unless otherwise
noted):
Video Bios Shadow
Video Bios Cacheable
System Bios Cacheable
C8000 - xxxxx Shadow **Try disabling these values**
Peer Concurrency
Assign IRQ To VGA **This MUST be enabled**
VGA Palette Snoop **This MUST be disabled**
Reset Config Data
Enable ESCD
Power Management **Try disabling this**
Virus Checking **Try disabling this**
PnP Aware OS
AGP Aperture size **approx half the size of your system RAM**
- Check for additional VGA drivers in safe mode (for both the monitor
and
graphics)
- Verify AGP support has been fully installed for that
motherboard/operating system combination
- Verify any on-board VGA adapter has been fully disabled in hardware
- Pull all other cards
- Change the order of cards
- Verify the motherboard is not being overclocked
- Check with the motherboard/system manufacturer for an updated BIOS and
Windows driver updates (for example: PCI Bus/Bridge updates and IRQ
Routing
updates for W'9x in the case of VIA chipsets)
- Turn off anything running in the background such as Screen savers,
Virus
Checkers, TSR's or Power Management.
- If you are not using the Com Ports or LPT Port(s), you could disable
them
(in the Bios) which will free up System Resources.

Also try later drivers for your monitor, PnP, standard monitor type or
original/update of the drivers (.inf file).


The shotgun approach to tech support lives on!

 

[Accessdabbler]

As I understand it, most monitors "remember" their settings for each resolution. If you are at 640 x 480 and set the OSD to what you like, the monitor will remember the settings the next time you are at 640 x 480. When you switch to 1024 x 768, you need to go into the OSD and make changes again.

You should only have to do this once at each resolution you use.

 

[gargouille]

So did any of them work?

 

[shale00]

Turns out overclocking the graphics card was the problem (Gf32Ti)u can see the pincushioning effect every time u raise the core or memory speed - but, O/C the CPU only has a minimal pincushioning affect on the display.