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Hello All,
I believe that I found an issue with the Quadro FX 4500 that has the
potential to affect a few members of this list, so I wanted to issue
something akin to a warning, but reminiscent of a bug fix.
We have a few dual core G5s with Invidia Quadro FX 4500's running OS
X 10.4.7. Its a good combo and performance seems to be more or less
worth the money (expensive, but high performance). However, I found a
terribly insidious bug when running these cards under "thousands of
colors" (16 bit)--a bit depth I had set arbitrarily, if I indeed ever
consciously set it at all.
Directly after reboot, upon first login, the card appears to work
fine, delivering very fast and high resolution quad buffered stereo
for both pymol and ono. These programs can be launched repeatedly and
simultaneously without problem during this first login session.
Then, after logging out and logging in again (there's the rub),
either as the same user or a different user, the computer freezes
when either pymol or ono is launched. I assume this has to do with
their accessing the hardware stereo features of the card. This
freezing correlates perfectly with the massive /var/log/system.log
logging of messages resembling:
Sep 16 22:02:23 foxp kernel[0]: Graphics chip error! Restarted.
Where "foxp" is the computer's name. Killing the offending program at
this point frees the computer from its suspended state as well as
eliminates the error logging.
After several hours of struggle and arguing with AppleCare about
whether or not I had a hardware problem (or should I say Apple-/
Care/, where the word "Care" is spoken with a hint of sarcasm?), I
found the fix to be absurdly easy: change resolution to "millions of
colors" (32 bit). I plan to file this bug with Apple.
Hopefully this message will find itself high in the google standings
for others who discover this unfortunate combination.
James
