An indescribable problem, seemingly also a hardware issue

Programming Help
1

I am a college student in China and have encountered a problem that I may not be able to explain. My ‘Screen (Flip)’ function seems to be malfunctioning, and the program displays the following error message after running:

PTB INFO: This is Psychtoolbox-3 for Microsoft Windows, under Matlab 64 Bit (Version 3.0.19- Build date: Feb 20 2023)
PTB INFO: OS support status: Windows 11 (Version 11.0) is not supported
PTB INFO: Type 'PsychtoolboxVersion' for more detailed version information
PTB INFO: Most parts of the Psychtoolbox distribution are licensed to you under terms of the MIT License, with
PTB INFO: some restrictions See file 'License. txt' in the Psychtoolbox root folder for the actual licensing conditions
PTB INFO: For information about paid support, support members and other commercial services, please type
PTB INFO: 'PsychPaidSupportAndServices'
PTB INFO: The detected endpoint of the vertical blank interval is equal or lower than the startline This indicates
PTB INFO: that i could not detect the duration of the vertical blank interval and won't be able to correct timestamps
PTB INFO: for it. This will introduce a very small and constant offset (typically<<1 msec) Read 'help BeampositionQueries'
PTB INFO: for how to correct this, should you really require that last few microseconds of precision
PTB INFO: Btw. this can also mean that your systems beamposition queries are slightly broken It may help timing precision to
PTB INFO: enable the beamposition workaround, as explained in 'help ConserveVRAMSettings', section' kPsychUseBeamposition QueryWorkaround '
PTB INFO: OpenGL Renderer is NVIDIA Corporation: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Laptop GPU/PCIE/SSE2:: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 527.83
PTB INFO: VBL startline=1440, VBL Endline=1439
PTB INFO: Measured monitor refresh interval from beamposition=6.060443 ms [165.004443 Hz]
PTB INFO: Will use beamposition query for accurate Flip time stamping
PTB INFO: Measured monitor refresh interval from VBLsync=6.072202 ms [164.684903 Hz] (50 valid samples take, stddev=0.109928 ms.)
PTB INFO: Reported monitor refresh interval from operating system=6.060606 ms [165.000000 Hz]
PTB INFO: Small deviations between reported values are normal and no reason to worry
PTB INFO:==============================================================================================================================
PTB INFO: WINDOWS DWM DESKTOP COMPOSITOR IS ACTIVE On this Windows 10 or later system, Psychtoolbox can no longer reliably detect if
PTB INFO: This will cause trouble for timing and integrity of visual stimulus or not You might be just fine, or you could be in trouble
PTB INFO: Use external measurement equipment and independent procedures to verify reliability of timing if you care about proper timing
PTB INFO:==============================================================================================================================
PTB DEBUG: DrawText: Failed to load external drawtext plugin [Unknown error]
PTB INFO: DrawText: Failed to load external drawtext plugin 'libptbdrawtext_ftgl64. DLL' Reverting to legacy GDI text renderer. ' Help DrawTextPlugin 'for troubleshooting
INFO: PTB's Screen ('Flip ', 10) command seats to have missed the requested stimulus presentation deadline
INFO: a total of 30 times out of a total of 40 flips during this session
INFO: This number is truly accurate (and indicative of real timing problems in your own code or your system)
INFO: if you provided requested stimuli on set times with the 'when' argument of Screen ('Flip ', window [, when]);
INFO: If you called Screen ('Flip ', window); Without the 'when' argument, this count is more of a 'mild' indicator
INFO: of timing behavior than a hard related measurement Large numbers may indicate problems and should be at least
INFO: reserve your closer attention Cfe Help SyncTrouble, the FAQ section at www.psychtoolboxorg and the
INFO: examples in the PDF presentation in PsychDocumentation/Psychtoolbox3 Slides.pdf for more information and timing tips
Warning: This session of your experience was run by you with the setting Screen ('Preferences', 'SkipSyncTests', 1)
Warning: This means that some internal self tests and calibrations were skipped Your stimulus presentation timing
Warning: may have been wrong This is fine for development and debugging of your experience, but for running the real
Warning: study, please make sure to set Screen ('Preferences', 'SkipSyncTests', 0) for maximum accuracy and reliability
It lasted for 42.627814 seconds.

The following is a Chinese error message
Incorrect use of Exp1 (this is a function)
Incorrect use of save
Find characters that cannot be represented by default encoding.

2

The bulk of what you posted is a warning, not an error. Also, that warning indicates steps you could take if you want to try to improve that situation.

The error messages are:
Incorrect use of Exp1 (this is a function)
Incorrect use of save

This are problems in your code, not in psychtoolbox.

3

Thank you! But I chose to display this information because I want to present specific operational situations, and I hope someone can help me analyze the possible causes of errors.

4

Nobody can help you with the information you gave. As the error messages said you are doing something wrong in your code. Exp1 is not a psychtoolbox function, and the way you are calling it in your code is apparently wrong. These are not real error messages by the way, which would include at least line numbers.
Again, all PTB output is not relevant to your problem, nor is your problem a PTB problem.

5

Yes, Exp1 is just a custom function written in the code.
In addition, I downloaded this code directly from the paper link and successfully ran it on someone else’s computer.
What I want to express is that my computer has some hardware or plugin issues, and I hope to infer possible problems from the operation of PTB itself.
Anyway, thank you for your reply.

6

I am lost. What you sent does not show a hardware problem. Can you attach the relevant log showing the problem?
If you are not happy about the sync trouble warnings, do as the warning says: Cfe Help SyncTrouble, the FAQ section at www.psychtoolbox.org and the INFO: examples in the PDF presentation in PsychDocumentation/Psychtoolbox3 Slides.pdf
For the other thing mentioned, also do as the text says: Help DrawTextPlugin 'for troubleshooting

7

diary on is a good way to capture all text output into a diary.txt file in the local folder accurately for posting here.

High perf/quality text rendering also seems to be broken, see help DrawTextPlugin for troubleshooting.

Visual timing/timestamping is probably about as good as it gets on a MS-Windows 11 laptop with Nvidia graphics, the output says how to improve further if needed. A setting of ‘SkipSyncTests’ 1 is ill advised for proper data collection though.

Also, with a display running at 165 Hz, flips can be easily missed with only less than 6 msecs time to spare for drawing a stimulus + all the other experiment logic, and the broken text rendering (leading to use of the slow fallback text renderer) alone might slow things down enough if any text is drawn.

Other than that, what Diederick says.

8

Thank you very much!(◍•ᴗ•◍):heart:Your reply is already precious to me!
Good wishes！

9

Hello! This issue has been resolved today due to some issues with the save function in MATLAB. It seems that Chinese characters cannot be used in the file save path. When I changed the folder name to English characters, the problem was resolved.
Thank you again. It’s very nice of you that you could personally reply to my question!