Weird DirectX Problem

[Guest]

Well, im having a problem running the display test in
DXDiag. When i click run test, instead of seeing a nice
spinning cube i see what looks like a garbled 2d square
spinning at warp speed. Thats the best i can describe it.
Anyone know what causes this? or anyone know how to fix
this? Any help would be appreciated. Here are the stats
on my system:

Athlon XP 1700+
Gigabyte GA-7VAXP Mobo, F11 BIOS, Hyperion 4.51
256 DDR400
ATI Radeon 9000 Pro 128mb, Catakyst 4.7, DirectX 9.0b
Windows XP Pro SP1
Soundblaster Live 5.1 XGamer
40gig Maxtor Diamond Max Plus ATA100
200gig Seagate Baracudda ATA100

 

[pjp]

Mine does that if I turn off "VSync" in the display driver. Turn it back on
and everything is ok.

 

[Guest]

Cool dude, thx. That took care of the problem. this has
been driving me crazy for months. does this mean the only
problem created by the vsync was the spinning cube coming
up garbled?

 

[pjp]

Basically if it doesn't make the game go "funny" don't worry about it. All
it pertains to is that when turned On/Active, the display is only updated
during the period between the end of one scan of the display and the next
starting scan. In practical terms that means when enabled, you can only
achieve (at best) a FPS equal to your refresh rate, e.g. if refresh is at
60Hz you can only get 60FPS max. When disabled, means the display may be
changed at any time during the display being updated which may cause some
"flashing", "small irregularities in display", "little bright spots
appearing/disappearing" etc. as the display gets changed part way thru the
cycle. In practice I've noticed few games where it becomes anything near
objectionable although I suspect if your hardware is capable of doing 120FPS
while the display is only doing 60Hz means the software is attempting to
update the display twice while the actual image on the display is only being
updated once, hence anomalies may be more pronounced then my "older" system
demonstrates (PIII at 733Mz, Radeon 7200) as I seldom get anywhere near even
100FPS in any "recent" (last couple of years now) game.

P.S. bothered me for a long time also and it was only luck during a clean
install that I noticed it was back to "normal" and then wasn't with the only
thing changed being the Vsync setting.