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jp427cobra
08-15-2007, 07:40 AM
I am experiencing an issue that seems to be stumping Painter tech support and thought I'd see if anyone here has experienced a similar issue. I have been using Painter IX for several years without issues, but after a recent computer upgrade I began experiencing problems.

Within a few seconds of painting with any brush, the canvas begins to flicker and corruption during the window refresh occurs. It seems to occur just after changing colors on the brush, or beginning a new painting. I have links to screen shots of an example canvas prior to the issue occuring, and while painting a stroke when the corruption is occurring. When the stroke completes the canvas usually corrects itself, but it has proven to make the program very difficult to use.

http://jpinkal.home.comcast.net/canvas-pre-problem.jpg

http://jpinkal.home.comcast.net/canvas-post-problem.jpg

The problem first occurred on Painter IX.1 and remained after upgrading to IX.5. Just for kicks I tried the Painter X Trial, and the problem went away; however, I am not interested in upgrading at this time and hope I can uncover the reason for my problem.

My system specs are as follows:

Windows XP Professional SP2
Intel Core 2 Quad at 2.4 GHz
eVGA nForce 680i SLI Mainboard
2 GB Ram
NVidia Geforce 8800 GTX
30" Monitor at 2560x1600
Wacom Intuos3

My previous system where Painter IX worked flawlessly was:

Windows XP Professional SP2
Intel P4 at 3.0 GHz
Intel PBZ-875 Mainboard
1 GB Ram
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro All-in-Wonder
19" Monitor at 1280x1024
Wacom Intuos3

Things that I have tried unsuccessfully include:
1. Resetting the Painter workspace by holding shift when starting the program.
2. Uninstalling and reinstalling Painter IX, and updating to IX.1 and IX.5.
3. Changing my monitor resolution to 1280x1024.
4. Various canvas sizes from 100x100 to 1920x1200. All exhibit the same corruption/repainting issue.
5. Updating to the most recent NVidia driver (162.18)

Please let me know if I have left off any relavant information or can provide more details that may be of help. My hunch is that this problem is somehow video driver related, or possibly a multi-threading issue resulting from the quad core processor. Thanks for your time!
genocell
08-15-2007, 12:38 PM
I don't know if you have tried this one yet, but have you tried changing the video card altogether? I had problems with my nvidia card previously but not the same problem as yours. See if you can borrow any other video card brands from your friend and test it out.
jp427cobra
08-16-2007, 04:32 AM
Thanks for the idea. Unfortunately I don't have any friends with extra PCI-E cards I can try, and I chose the NVidia card to support other applications I use so I think I'd probably choose to upgrade to Painter X before buying a second video card anyway. I agree that this is the likely culprit, and am trying to figure out if I can get NVidia to at least acknowledge that there is a problem.
jp427cobra
08-18-2007, 01:06 AM
I am happy to report that I have found the solution to this problem. Ater several days of trying every NVidia driver out there, reinstalling Painter, and perusing Google and various CG forums, I decided to widen my search to general application flickering issues.

There it was: the Microsoft Intellipoint Mouse Software (6.0) was causing similar issues in another program. I vaguely remembered that Painter had ~seemed~ to work correctly just after reinstalling it on my new system, but that had been a couple of weeks ago and I couldn't be sure. I hadn't really used it as I was busy setting everything else back up. A few days before I finally sat down to draw I had upgraded my keyboard and mouse to the Microsoft Laser Desktop 6000, which I love, and had installed the software to go with it.

Without rambling too much more, after uninstalling the Intellipoint software and rebooting, the problems have stopped. I don't know if the Intellipoint software was conflicting with Painter itself, or perhaps the video or Wacom drivers, but needless to say with it out of the picture I'm back to painting again. I hope that this can be helpful to anyone else out there that ever encounters a similar issue.
Jinbrown
08-18-2007, 02:57 PM
Hi,

As soon as you mentioned Intellipoint, I remembered another Painter user who had a similar problem and found that to be the culprit. Here's the thread at CGTalk's Painter forum (read post # 5 to see the mention of Intellipoint).

Draw/Refresh Issue (http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=84489)

Sorry I didn't remember this earlier!


Jin
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08-18-2007, 02:57 PM
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