I have 10 new(ish) PCs, all of which should contain identical hardware and software. They all worked Monday. Today, three of them stopped working. I’m not sure what the critical problem is (hence this email) but DriftDemo doesn’t (really) work. Below I’ve appended first the hardware and OS stuff, then the output from my first attempt to run DriftDemo, then the second attempt, the next message shows the third attempt. This last attempt did, at least, produce a drifting grating, but it looked very jagged and, well, you’ll see the error messages. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
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Device name NSQC0262A07
Full device name NSQC0262A07.enterprise.internal.city.ac.uk
Processor Intel(R) Core™ i5-7500 CPU @ 3.40GHz 3.41 GHz
Installed RAM 16.0 GB (15.9 GB usable)
Device ID 33137527-b571-4eb4-a953-b4732d4138e9
Product ID 00329-00000-00003-AA235
System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
Pen and touch No pen or touch input is available for this display
Edition Windows 10 Enterprise
Version 21H1
Installed on 25/08/2021
OS build 19043.1466
Experience Windows Feature Experience Pack 120.2212.3920.0
PsychStartup: Adding path of installed GStreamer runtime to library path. [C:\gstreamer\1.0\x86_64\bin]
DriftDemo
PTB-INFO: This is Psychtoolbox-3 for Microsoft Windows, under Matlab 64-Bit (Version 3.0.15 - Build date: Feb 7 2019).
PTB-INFO: Support status on this operating system release: Windows 10 (Version 10.0) supported and tested to some limited degree.
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 exact licensing conditions.
PTB-WARNING: Created onscreen window on screenid 0 will probably not be able to use GPU pageflipping for
PTB-WARNING: Screen(‘Flip’)! May cause tearing artifacts and unreliable or wrong visual stimulus onset timestamping!
PTB-WARNING: Could not bind wglChoosePixelFormat - Extension. Some features will be unavailable, e.g., Anti-Aliasing and high precision framebuffers.
PTB-WARNING: Created onscreen window on screenid 0 will probably not be able to use GPU pageflipping for
PTB-WARNING: Screen(‘Flip’)! May cause tearing artifacts and unreliable or wrong visual stimulus onset timestamping!
PTB-WARNING: Your graphics driver doesn’t allow me to control if bufferswaps should be synchronized to the vertical retrace!
PTB-WARNING: This can cause massive stimulus timing problems, failure of the sync tests and calibrations and severe visual tearing artifacts!
PTB-WARNING: Please update your display graphics driver as soon as possible to fix this and make sure this functionality is not disabled in
PTB-WARNING: the display settings control panel of your graphics card.
PTB-WARNING: If everything else fails, you can usually manually enable synchronization to vertical retrace somewhere in the display settings
PTB-WARNING: control panel of your machine.
PTB-WARNING: Seems that Microsofts OpenGL software renderer is active! This will likely cause miserable
PTB-WARNING: performance, lack of functionality and severe timing and synchronization problems.
PTB-WARNING: Most likely you do not have native OpenGL vendor supplied drivers (ICD’s) for your graphics hardware
PTB-WARNING: installed on your system.Many Windows machines (and especially Windows Vista) come without these preinstalled.
PTB-WARNING: Go to the webpage of your computer vendor or directly to the webpage of NVidia/AMD/ATI/3DLabs/Intel
PTB-WARNING: and make sure that you’ve download and install their latest driver for your graphics card.
PTB-WARNING: Other causes, after you’ve ruled out the above:
PTB-WARNING: Maybe you run at a too high display resolution, or the system is running out of ressources for some other reason.
PTB-WARNING: Another reason could be that you disabled hardware acceleration in the display settings panel: Make sure that
PTB-WARNING: in Display settings panel → Settings → Advanced → Troubleshoot → The hardware acceleration slider is
PTB-WARNING: set to ‘Full’ (rightmost position).
PTB-WARNING: Actually, it is pointless to continue with the software renderer, as that will cause more trouble than good.
PTB-WARNING: I will abort now. Read the troubleshooting tips above to fix the problem. You can override this if you add the following
PTB-WARNING: command: Screen(‘Preference’, ‘ConserveVRAM’, 64); to get a functional, but close to useless window up and running.
Error using Screen
See error message printed above.
Error in DriftDemo (line 76)
w=Screen(‘OpenWindow’,screenNumber, gray);
Screen(‘Preference’, ‘ConserveVRAM’, 64);
DriftDemo
PTB-INFO: This is Psychtoolbox-3 for Microsoft Windows, under Matlab 64-Bit (Version 3.0.15 - Build date: Feb 7 2019).
PTB-INFO: Support status on this operating system release: Windows 10 (Version 10.0) supported and tested to some limited degree.
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 exact licensing conditions.
PTB-WARNING: Created onscreen window on screenid 0 will probably not be able to use GPU pageflipping for
PTB-WARNING: Screen(‘Flip’)! May cause tearing artifacts and unreliable or wrong visual stimulus onset timestamping!
PTB-WARNING: Could not bind wglChoosePixelFormat - Extension. Some features will be unavailable, e.g., Anti-Aliasing and high precision framebuffers.
PTB-WARNING: Created onscreen window on screenid 0 will probably not be able to use GPU pageflipping for
PTB-WARNING: Screen(‘Flip’)! May cause tearing artifacts and unreliable or wrong visual stimulus onset timestamping!
PTB-WARNING: Your graphics driver doesn’t allow me to control if bufferswaps should be synchronized to the vertical retrace!
PTB-WARNING: This can cause massive stimulus timing problems, failure of the sync tests and calibrations and severe visual tearing artifacts!
PTB-WARNING: Please update your display graphics driver as soon as possible to fix this and make sure this functionality is not disabled in
PTB-WARNING: the display settings control panel of your graphics card.
PTB-WARNING: If everything else fails, you can usually manually enable synchronization to vertical retrace somewhere in the display settings
PTB-WARNING: control panel of your machine.
PTB-WARNING: Seems that Microsofts OpenGL software renderer is active! This will likely cause miserable
PTB-WARNING: performance, lack of functionality and severe timing and synchronization problems.
PTB-WARNING: Most likely you do not have native OpenGL vendor supplied drivers (ICD’s) for your graphics hardware
PTB-WARNING: installed on your system.Many Windows machines (and especially Windows Vista) come without these preinstalled.
PTB-WARNING: Go to the webpage of your computer vendor or directly to the webpage of NVidia/AMD/ATI/3DLabs/Intel
PTB-WARNING: and make sure that you’ve download and install their latest driver for your graphics card.
PTB-WARNING: Other causes, after you’ve ruled out the above:
PTB-WARNING: Maybe you run at a too high display resolution, or the system is running out of ressources for some other reason.
PTB-WARNING: Another reason could be that you disabled hardware acceleration in the display settings panel: Make sure that
PTB-WARNING: in Display settings panel → Settings → Advanced → Troubleshoot → The hardware acceleration slider is
PTB-WARNING: set to ‘Full’ (rightmost position).
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…
WARNING: Will enable VBL busywait-workaround before trying final VBL Calibration run No. 3.
WARNING: This will hopefully work-around graphics driver bugs of the GPU sync-to-retrace mechanism. Cross your fingers!
PTB-INFO: OpenGL-Renderer is Microsoft Corporation :: GDI Generic :: 1.1.0
PTB-INFO: VBL startline = 1080 , VBL Endline = 1123
PTB-INFO: Measured monitor refresh interval from beamposition = 16.566547 ms [60.362609 Hz].
PTB-INFO: Will use beamposition query for accurate Flip time stamping.
PTB-INFO: Measured monitor refresh interval from VBLsync = 15.896290 ms [62.907760 Hz]. (50 valid samples taken, stddev=0.588817 ms.)
PTB-INFO: Reported monitor refresh interval from operating system = 15.625000 ms [64.000000 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, 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…
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 stimuli 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: ==============================================================================================================================
WARNING: Couldn’t compute a reliable estimate of monitor refresh interval! Trouble with VBL syncing?!?
----- ! 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
See error message printed above.
Error in DriftDemo (line 76)
w=Screen(‘OpenWindow’,screenNumber, gray);