graphics card probelms

1
Hi,

I try to run some simple script at my computer (Pentium 4; 2,6 GHz;2 GB RAM; Windows XP SP2) with a 3DLabs WildCat vp880 pro graphics card. Yesterday I installed the newest driver. Formally I used the ViSaGe stimulus genarator from CRS. Is this the cause for my problem?:

I got the following error message:

>> rosner5_expans_tan


PTB-INFO: This is the OpenGL-Psychtoolbox for Microsoft Windows, version 3.0.8. (Build date: Aug 17 2009) under Matlab.
PTB-INFO: Type 'PsychtoolboxVersion' for more detailed version information.
PTB-INFO: Psychtoolbox is licensed to you under terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). See file 'License.txt' in the
PTB-INFO: Psychtoolbox root folder for a copy of the GPL license.

PTB-WARNING: Your graphics driver doesn't allow me to control syncing wrt. vertical retrace!
PTB-WARNING: Please update your display graphics driver as soon as possible to fix this.
PTB-WARNING: Until then, you can manually enable syncing to VBL somewhere in the display settings
PTB-WARNING: tab of your machine.


OpenGL-Extensions are: GL_ARB_multitexture GL_ARB_texture_env_add GL_ARB_texture_env_combine GL_ARB_texture_env_crossbar GL_ARB_texture_border_clamp GL_ARB_texture_cube_map GL_ARB_texture_env_dot3 GL_ARB_transpose_matrix GL_EXT_bgra GL_EXT_blend_subtract GL_EXT_blend_minmax GL_EXT_compiled_vertex_array GL_EXT_packed_pixels GL_EXT_polygon_offset GL_EXT_rescale_normal GL_EXT_separate_specular_color GL_EXT_secondary_color GL_EXT_texture3D GL_EXT_texture_object GL_EXT_texture_edge_clamp GL_EXT_texture_env_add GL_EXT_texture_env_combine GL_EXT_texture_env_dot3 GL_EXT_texture_cube_map GL_EXT_texture_filter_anisotropic GL_EXT_multi_draw_arrays GL_SGIS_multitexture GL_SGIS_texture_border_clamp GL_SGIS_texture_lod GL_NV_register_combiners GL_NV_vertex_program GL_NV_texgen_reflection GL_WIN_swap_hint GL_ARB_shader_objects GL_ARB_vertex_shader GL_ARB_fragment_shader GL_ARB_shading_language_100 GL_KTX_buffer_region GL_ARB_point_parameters GL_ARB_depth_texture GL_ARB_shadow

PTB-WARNING: Couldn't even collect one single valid flip interval sample! Sanity range checks failed!
PTB-WARNING: Could be a system bug, or a temporary timing problem. Retrying the procedure might help if
PTB-WARNING: the latter is the culprit.
PTB-WARNING: Couldn't collect valid flip interval samples! Fatal VBL sync failure!
PTB-WARNING: Either synchronization of doublebuffer swapping to the vertical retrace signal of your display is broken,
PTB-WARNING: or the mechanism for detection of swap completion is broken. In any case, this is an operating system or gfx-driver bug!

WARNING: VBL Calibration run No. 1 failed. Retrying...
PTB-WARNING: Couldn't even collect one single valid flip interval sample! Sanity range checks failed!
PTB-WARNING: Could be a system bug, or a temporary timing problem. Retrying the procedure might help if
PTB-WARNING: the latter is the culprit.
PTB-WARNING: Couldn't collect valid flip interval samples! Fatal VBL sync failure!
PTB-WARNING: Either synchronization of doublebuffer swapping to the vertical retrace signal of your display is broken,
PTB-WARNING: or the mechanism for detection of swap completion is broken. In any case, this is an operating system or gfx-driver bug!

WARNING: VBL Calibration run No. 2 failed. Retrying...
PTB-WARNING: Couldn't even collect one single valid flip interval sample! Sanity range checks failed!
PTB-WARNING: Could be a system bug, or a temporary timing problem. Retrying the procedure might help if
PTB-WARNING: the latter is the culprit.
PTB-WARNING: Couldn't collect valid flip interval samples! Fatal VBL sync failure!
PTB-WARNING: Either synchronization of doublebuffer swapping to the vertical retrace signal of your display is broken,
PTB-WARNING: or the mechanism for detection of swap completion is broken. In any case, this is an operating system or gfx-driver bug!


PTB-INFO: OpenGL-Renderer is 3Dlabs :: Wildcat VP880 PRO - GL2 :: 1.3.2
PTB-INFO: VBL startline = 1024 , VBL Endline = 1023
PTB-INFO: Measured monitor refresh interval from beamposition = 10.500109 ms [95.237108 Hz].
PTB-INFO: Will use beamposition query for accurate Flip time stamping.
PTB-INFO: Measured monitor refresh interval from VBLsync = 0.000000 ms [1.#INF00 Hz]. (0 valid samples taken, stddev=1000000000.000000 ms.)
PTB-INFO: Reported monitor refresh interval from operating system = 16.666667 ms [60.000000 Hz].
PTB-INFO: Small deviations between reported values are normal and no reason to worry.

PTB-WARNING: Your graphics hardware & driver doesn't support OpenGL rectangle textures.
PTB-WARNING: This won't affect the correctness or visual accuracy of image drawing, but it can significantly
PTB-WARNING: degrade performance/speed and increase memory consumption of images by up to a factor of 4!
PTB-WARNING: If you use a lot of image stimuli (DrawTexture, Offscreen windows, Stereo display, Quicktime movies)
PTB-WARNING: and you are unhappy with the performance, then please upgrade your graphics driver and possibly
PTB-WARNING: your gfx hardware if you need higher performance...

WARNING: Couldn't compute a reliable estimate of monitor refresh interval! Trouble with VBL syncing?!?

WARNING: Mismatch between measured monitor refresh interval and interval reported by operating system.
This indicates massive problems with VBL sync.

WARNING: Measured monitor refresh interval indicates a display refresh of less than 25 Hz or more than 250 Hz?!?
This indicates massive problems with VBL sync.


----- ! PTB - ERROR: SYNCHRONIZATION FAILURE ! ----

One or more internal checks (see Warnings above) indicate that synchronization
of Psychtoolbox to the vertical retrace (VBL) is not working on your setup.

This will seriously impair proper stimulus presentation and stimulus presentation timing!
Please read 'help SyncTrouble' for information about how to solve or work-around the problem.
You can force Psychtoolbox to continue, despite the severe problems, by adding the command
Screen('Preference', 'SkipSyncTests', 1); at the top of your script, if you really know what you are doing.


??? Error using ==> Screen

Error in ==> rosner5_expans_tan at 11
[w,rect]=Screen('OpenWindow',0,[255 255 255],[0 0 800 600]);




Thank you

Best regards

Ronny Rosner
2
No, the problem is missing sync of bufferswaps to the vertical retrace, as the error messages and warnings in the output suggest. The card doesn't allow PTB to enable that feature so you'll need to enable it manually in the display setup dialog.

In the "Photos" section of the forum i placed a album "Wildcat Settings" with some screenshots of the dialog. Open the dialog on your system, then in the OpenGL settings tab, check the "Wait for Vertical Sync" checkbox, and make sure the "Buffer swap mode" is set to "Auto Select" or "Pageflipping" or "buffer swapping" or something like that.

The mismatch between the reported "measured monitor refresh interval from beamposition" of 95 Hz and the interval reported by the operating system of 60 Hz, suggests that you are using a dual-display setup and that the wrong monitor is assigned as "primary monitor". This would cause a followup error, once your current problem is fixed. You can either switch to a single display mode, or change the arrangement of monitors (or assignment of primary monitor somewhere in the display settings dialog) or make sure that both displays run at the same resolution, color depths and refresh rate and that in the "Dual monitor options" dialog, the "Genlocked modes only" checkbox is set.

The Wildcat VP 880 is a rather ancient card by todays standards, with limited OpenGL feature set and performance. Depending on what you wanna do with it, you might be better off with a new recent NVidia card - even a relatively cheap 100 euro part will outperform the Wildcat in most cases easily. For the VISaGe it is a good match, because CRS provides specialized/optimized device drivers for using it with their device, and because the rendering on VISaGE is not based on any fancy OpenGL hardware accelerated GPU features. For use with pretty much any other modern toolkit, the featureset is rather restricted, e.g., slow inefficient support for image drawing and offscreen windows, no support for our image processing pipeline and things like high precision framebuffers...

-mario

--- In psychtoolbox@yahoogroups.com, "ronny.rosner" <ronny.rosner@...> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I try to run some simple script at my computer (Pentium 4; 2,6 GHz;2 GB RAM; Windows XP SP2) with a 3DLabs WildCat vp880 pro graphics card. Yesterday I installed the newest driver. Formally I used the ViSaGe stimulus genarator from CRS. Is this the cause for my problem?:
>
> I got the following error message:
>
> >> rosner5_expans_tan
>
>
> PTB-INFO: This is the OpenGL-Psychtoolbox for Microsoft Windows, version 3.0.8. (Build date: Aug 17 2009) under Matlab.
> PTB-INFO: Type 'PsychtoolboxVersion' for more detailed version information.
> PTB-INFO: Psychtoolbox is licensed to you under terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). See file 'License.txt' in the
> PTB-INFO: Psychtoolbox root folder for a copy of the GPL license.
>
> PTB-WARNING: Your graphics driver doesn't allow me to control syncing wrt. vertical retrace!
> PTB-WARNING: Please update your display graphics driver as soon as possible to fix this.
> PTB-WARNING: Until then, you can manually enable syncing to VBL somewhere in the display settings
> PTB-WARNING: tab of your machine.
>
>
> OpenGL-Extensions are: GL_ARB_multitexture GL_ARB_texture_env_add GL_ARB_texture_env_combine GL_ARB_texture_env_crossbar GL_ARB_texture_border_clamp GL_ARB_texture_cube_map GL_ARB_texture_env_dot3 GL_ARB_transpose_matrix GL_EXT_bgra GL_EXT_blend_subtract GL_EXT_blend_minmax GL_EXT_compiled_vertex_array GL_EXT_packed_pixels GL_EXT_polygon_offset GL_EXT_rescale_normal GL_EXT_separate_specular_color GL_EXT_secondary_color GL_EXT_texture3D GL_EXT_texture_object GL_EXT_texture_edge_clamp GL_EXT_texture_env_add GL_EXT_texture_env_combine GL_EXT_texture_env_dot3 GL_EXT_texture_cube_map GL_EXT_texture_filter_anisotropic GL_EXT_multi_draw_arrays GL_SGIS_multitexture GL_SGIS_texture_border_clamp GL_SGIS_texture_lod GL_NV_register_combiners GL_NV_vertex_program GL_NV_texgen_reflection GL_WIN_swap_hint GL_ARB_shader_objects GL_ARB_vertex_shader GL_ARB_fragment_shader GL_ARB_shading_language_100 GL_KTX_buffer_region GL_ARB_point_parameters GL_ARB_depth_texture GL_ARB_shadow
>
> PTB-WARNING: Couldn't even collect one single valid flip interval sample! Sanity range checks failed!
> PTB-WARNING: Could be a system bug, or a temporary timing problem. Retrying the procedure might help if
> PTB-WARNING: the latter is the culprit.
> PTB-WARNING: Couldn't collect valid flip interval samples! Fatal VBL sync failure!
> PTB-WARNING: Either synchronization of doublebuffer swapping to the vertical retrace signal of your display is broken,
> PTB-WARNING: or the mechanism for detection of swap completion is broken. In any case, this is an operating system or gfx-driver bug!
>
> WARNING: VBL Calibration run No. 1 failed. Retrying...
> PTB-WARNING: Couldn't even collect one single valid flip interval sample! Sanity range checks failed!
> PTB-WARNING: Could be a system bug, or a temporary timing problem. Retrying the procedure might help if
> PTB-WARNING: the latter is the culprit.
> PTB-WARNING: Couldn't collect valid flip interval samples! Fatal VBL sync failure!
> PTB-WARNING: Either synchronization of doublebuffer swapping to the vertical retrace signal of your display is broken,
> PTB-WARNING: or the mechanism for detection of swap completion is broken. In any case, this is an operating system or gfx-driver bug!
>
> WARNING: VBL Calibration run No. 2 failed. Retrying...
> PTB-WARNING: Couldn't even collect one single valid flip interval sample! Sanity range checks failed!
> PTB-WARNING: Could be a system bug, or a temporary timing problem. Retrying the procedure might help if
> PTB-WARNING: the latter is the culprit.
> PTB-WARNING: Couldn't collect valid flip interval samples! Fatal VBL sync failure!
> PTB-WARNING: Either synchronization of doublebuffer swapping to the vertical retrace signal of your display is broken,
> PTB-WARNING: or the mechanism for detection of swap completion is broken. In any case, this is an operating system or gfx-driver bug!
>
>
> PTB-INFO: OpenGL-Renderer is 3Dlabs :: Wildcat VP880 PRO - GL2 :: 1.3.2
> PTB-INFO: VBL startline = 1024 , VBL Endline = 1023
> PTB-INFO: Measured monitor refresh interval from beamposition = 10.500109 ms [95.237108 Hz].
> PTB-INFO: Will use beamposition query for accurate Flip time stamping.
> PTB-INFO: Measured monitor refresh interval from VBLsync = 0.000000 ms [1.#INF00 Hz]. (0 valid samples taken, stddev=1000000000.000000 ms.)
> PTB-INFO: Reported monitor refresh interval from operating system = 16.666667 ms [60.000000 Hz].
> PTB-INFO: Small deviations between reported values are normal and no reason to worry.
>
> PTB-WARNING: Your graphics hardware & driver doesn't support OpenGL rectangle textures.
> PTB-WARNING: This won't affect the correctness or visual accuracy of image drawing, but it can significantly
> PTB-WARNING: degrade performance/speed and increase memory consumption of images by up to a factor of 4!
> PTB-WARNING: If you use a lot of image stimuli (DrawTexture, Offscreen windows, Stereo display, Quicktime movies)
> PTB-WARNING: and you are unhappy with the performance, then please upgrade your graphics driver and possibly
> PTB-WARNING: your gfx hardware if you need higher performance...
>
> WARNING: Couldn't compute a reliable estimate of monitor refresh interval! Trouble with VBL syncing?!?
>
> WARNING: Mismatch between measured monitor refresh interval and interval reported by operating system.
> This indicates massive problems with VBL sync.
>
> WARNING: Measured monitor refresh interval indicates a display refresh of less than 25 Hz or more than 250 Hz?!?
> This indicates massive problems with VBL sync.
>
>
> ----- ! PTB - ERROR: SYNCHRONIZATION FAILURE ! ----
>
> One or more internal checks (see Warnings above) indicate that synchronization
> of Psychtoolbox to the vertical retrace (VBL) is not working on your setup.
>
> This will seriously impair proper stimulus presentation and stimulus presentation timing!
> Please read 'help SyncTrouble' for information about how to solve or work-around the problem.
> You can force Psychtoolbox to continue, despite the severe problems, by adding the command
> Screen('Preference', 'SkipSyncTests', 1); at the top of your script, if you really know what you are doing.
>
>
> ??? Error using ==> Screen
>
> Error in ==> rosner5_expans_tan at 11
> [w,rect]=Screen('OpenWindow',0,[255 255 255],[0 0 800 600]);
>
>
>
>
> Thank you
>
> Best regards
>
> Ronny Rosner
>
3
Thank you Mario,

so it might be easier for me to install a GeForce 8800GT which I have.

Thank you
Ronny




--- In psychtoolbox@yahoogroups.com, "Mario" <mario.kleiner@...> wrote:
>
>
>
> No, the problem is missing sync of bufferswaps to the vertical retrace, as the error messages and warnings in the output suggest. The card doesn't allow PTB to enable that feature so you'll need to enable it manually in the display setup dialog.
>
> In the "Photos" section of the forum i placed a album "Wildcat Settings" with some screenshots of the dialog. Open the dialog on your system, then in the OpenGL settings tab, check the "Wait for Vertical Sync" checkbox, and make sure the "Buffer swap mode" is set to "Auto Select" or "Pageflipping" or "buffer swapping" or something like that.
>
> The mismatch between the reported "measured monitor refresh interval from beamposition" of 95 Hz and the interval reported by the operating system of 60 Hz, suggests that you are using a dual-display setup and that the wrong monitor is assigned as "primary monitor". This would cause a followup error, once your current problem is fixed. You can either switch to a single display mode, or change the arrangement of monitors (or assignment of primary monitor somewhere in the display settings dialog) or make sure that both displays run at the same resolution, color depths and refresh rate and that in the "Dual monitor options" dialog, the "Genlocked modes only" checkbox is set.
>
> The Wildcat VP 880 is a rather ancient card by todays standards, with limited OpenGL feature set and performance. Depending on what you wanna do with it, you might be better off with a new recent NVidia card - even a relatively cheap 100 euro part will outperform the Wildcat in most cases easily. For the VISaGe it is a good match, because CRS provides specialized/optimized device drivers for using it with their device, and because the rendering on VISaGE is not based on any fancy OpenGL hardware accelerated GPU features. For use with pretty much any other modern toolkit, the featureset is rather restricted, e.g., slow inefficient support for image drawing and offscreen windows, no support for our image processing pipeline and things like high precision framebuffers...
>
> -mario
>
> --- In psychtoolbox@yahoogroups.com, "ronny.rosner" <ronny.rosner@> wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > I try to run some simple script at my computer (Pentium 4; 2,6 GHz;2 GB RAM; Windows XP SP2) with a 3DLabs WildCat vp880 pro graphics card. Yesterday I installed the newest driver. Formally I used the ViSaGe stimulus genarator from CRS. Is this the cause for my problem?:
> >
> > I got the following error message:
> >
> > >> rosner5_expans_tan
> >
> >
> > PTB-INFO: This is the OpenGL-Psychtoolbox for Microsoft Windows, version 3.0.8. (Build date: Aug 17 2009) under Matlab.
> > PTB-INFO: Type 'PsychtoolboxVersion' for more detailed version information.
> > PTB-INFO: Psychtoolbox is licensed to you under terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). See file 'License.txt' in the
> > PTB-INFO: Psychtoolbox root folder for a copy of the GPL license.
> >
> > PTB-WARNING: Your graphics driver doesn't allow me to control syncing wrt. vertical retrace!
> > PTB-WARNING: Please update your display graphics driver as soon as possible to fix this.
> > PTB-WARNING: Until then, you can manually enable syncing to VBL somewhere in the display settings
> > PTB-WARNING: tab of your machine.
> >
> >
> > OpenGL-Extensions are: GL_ARB_multitexture GL_ARB_texture_env_add GL_ARB_texture_env_combine GL_ARB_texture_env_crossbar GL_ARB_texture_border_clamp GL_ARB_texture_cube_map GL_ARB_texture_env_dot3 GL_ARB_transpose_matrix GL_EXT_bgra GL_EXT_blend_subtract GL_EXT_blend_minmax GL_EXT_compiled_vertex_array GL_EXT_packed_pixels GL_EXT_polygon_offset GL_EXT_rescale_normal GL_EXT_separate_specular_color GL_EXT_secondary_color GL_EXT_texture3D GL_EXT_texture_object GL_EXT_texture_edge_clamp GL_EXT_texture_env_add GL_EXT_texture_env_combine GL_EXT_texture_env_dot3 GL_EXT_texture_cube_map GL_EXT_texture_filter_anisotropic GL_EXT_multi_draw_arrays GL_SGIS_multitexture GL_SGIS_texture_border_clamp GL_SGIS_texture_lod GL_NV_register_combiners GL_NV_vertex_program GL_NV_texgen_reflection GL_WIN_swap_hint GL_ARB_shader_objects GL_ARB_vertex_shader GL_ARB_fragment_shader GL_ARB_shading_language_100 GL_KTX_buffer_region GL_ARB_point_parameters GL_ARB_depth_texture GL_ARB_shadow
> >
> > PTB-WARNING: Couldn't even collect one single valid flip interval sample! Sanity range checks failed!
> > PTB-WARNING: Could be a system bug, or a temporary timing problem. Retrying the procedure might help if
> > PTB-WARNING: the latter is the culprit.
> > PTB-WARNING: Couldn't collect valid flip interval samples! Fatal VBL sync failure!
> > PTB-WARNING: Either synchronization of doublebuffer swapping to the vertical retrace signal of your display is broken,
> > PTB-WARNING: or the mechanism for detection of swap completion is broken. In any case, this is an operating system or gfx-driver bug!
> >
> > WARNING: VBL Calibration run No. 1 failed. Retrying...
> > PTB-WARNING: Couldn't even collect one single valid flip interval sample! Sanity range checks failed!
> > PTB-WARNING: Could be a system bug, or a temporary timing problem. Retrying the procedure might help if
> > PTB-WARNING: the latter is the culprit.
> > PTB-WARNING: Couldn't collect valid flip interval samples! Fatal VBL sync failure!
> > PTB-WARNING: Either synchronization of doublebuffer swapping to the vertical retrace signal of your display is broken,
> > PTB-WARNING: or the mechanism for detection of swap completion is broken. In any case, this is an operating system or gfx-driver bug!
> >
> > WARNING: VBL Calibration run No. 2 failed. Retrying...
> > PTB-WARNING: Couldn't even collect one single valid flip interval sample! Sanity range checks failed!
> > PTB-WARNING: Could be a system bug, or a temporary timing problem. Retrying the procedure might help if
> > PTB-WARNING: the latter is the culprit.
> > PTB-WARNING: Couldn't collect valid flip interval samples! Fatal VBL sync failure!
> > PTB-WARNING: Either synchronization of doublebuffer swapping to the vertical retrace signal of your display is broken,
> > PTB-WARNING: or the mechanism for detection of swap completion is broken. In any case, this is an operating system or gfx-driver bug!
> >
> >
> > PTB-INFO: OpenGL-Renderer is 3Dlabs :: Wildcat VP880 PRO - GL2 :: 1.3.2
> > PTB-INFO: VBL startline = 1024 , VBL Endline = 1023
> > PTB-INFO: Measured monitor refresh interval from beamposition = 10.500109 ms [95.237108 Hz].
> > PTB-INFO: Will use beamposition query for accurate Flip time stamping.
> > PTB-INFO: Measured monitor refresh interval from VBLsync = 0.000000 ms [1.#INF00 Hz]. (0 valid samples taken, stddev=1000000000.000000 ms.)
> > PTB-INFO: Reported monitor refresh interval from operating system = 16.666667 ms [60.000000 Hz].
> > PTB-INFO: Small deviations between reported values are normal and no reason to worry.
> >
> > PTB-WARNING: Your graphics hardware & driver doesn't support OpenGL rectangle textures.
> > PTB-WARNING: This won't affect the correctness or visual accuracy of image drawing, but it can significantly
> > PTB-WARNING: degrade performance/speed and increase memory consumption of images by up to a factor of 4!
> > PTB-WARNING: If you use a lot of image stimuli (DrawTexture, Offscreen windows, Stereo display, Quicktime movies)
> > PTB-WARNING: and you are unhappy with the performance, then please upgrade your graphics driver and possibly
> > PTB-WARNING: your gfx hardware if you need higher performance...
> >
> > WARNING: Couldn't compute a reliable estimate of monitor refresh interval! Trouble with VBL syncing?!?
> >
> > WARNING: Mismatch between measured monitor refresh interval and interval reported by operating system.
> > This indicates massive problems with VBL sync.
> >
> > WARNING: Measured monitor refresh interval indicates a display refresh of less than 25 Hz or more than 250 Hz?!?
> > This indicates massive problems with VBL sync.
> >
> >
> > ----- ! PTB - ERROR: SYNCHRONIZATION FAILURE ! ----
> >
> > One or more internal checks (see Warnings above) indicate that synchronization
> > of Psychtoolbox to the vertical retrace (VBL) is not working on your setup.
> >
> > This will seriously impair proper stimulus presentation and stimulus presentation timing!
> > Please read 'help SyncTrouble' for information about how to solve or work-around the problem.
> > You can force Psychtoolbox to continue, despite the severe problems, by adding the command
> > Screen('Preference', 'SkipSyncTests', 1); at the top of your script, if you really know what you are doing.
> >
> >
> > ??? Error using ==> Screen
> >
> > Error in ==> rosner5_expans_tan at 11
> > [w,rect]=Screen('OpenWindow',0,[255 255 255],[0 0 800 600]);
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Thank you
> >
> > Best regards
> >
> > Ronny Rosner
> >
>