Graphic card question

[Tolya]

I have a question for the people well versed in computers (and I mean WELL VERSED).

I'll skip the part where my graphic card drivers screwed up (again) and ask this:

Is it possible for the OS drivers to have ANY influence on the display of the graphics on the main boot up screen? The one where RAM is counted?

I thought no such thing is possible as those screens are controlled by GC's BIOS. Today I have seen evidence that says otherwise.

How can corrupted Windows drivers influence the pre-OS boot screens? Yesterday I would ask if that is even possible... but today Im only asking "how".

[DaveJB]

It'd help if we know what evidence you were talking about. Off the top of my head I can only think of two scenarios - using software to overclock the graphics card (although IIRC that wouldn't actually affect the boot-up process unless you modified the card's firmware), and on newer PCs that replace the motherboard BIOS with an EFI, which from what I understand can be affected by the OS.

[Executor32]

I had an issue like this with my 8800GT. I was running two of them in SLI, and the game I was playing locked up. I rebooted, and suddenly the BIOS screens (and any other non-graphics-hardware-using scenario like safe mode) were all garbled, and the secondary card was being recognized as a 9800GT and would no longer allow SLI with the other card. Taking out the secondary card didn't fix the former issue, and neither did switching it with the primary, so I assumed it was a problem with the motherboard. Fast-forward to a week ago when I upgraded to a GTX 275, and lo and behold the problem was gone. I still have yet to figure out exactly what the fuck happened.

[Darth Mall]

I had an issue like this with my 8800GT. I was running two of them in SLI, and the game I was playing locked up. I rebooted, and suddenly the BIOS screens (and any other non-graphics-hardware-using scenario like safe mode) were all garbled, and the secondary card was being recognized as a 9800GT and would no longer allow SLI with the other card. Taking out the secondary card didn't fix the former issue, and neither did switching it with the primary, so I assumed it was a problem with the motherboard. Fast-forward to a week ago when I upgraded to a GTX 275, and lo and behold the problem was gone. I still have yet to figure out exactly what the fuck happened.

Sounds more like overheating (the cards still being overheated post reboot) or some form of damage to the card itself.

[Tolya]

I can agree with the overheating bit. The truth is that most probably my old GeForce 7600 GS is near the end of its life.

What happened exactly is that I was playing Modern Warfare 2. At one point the screen froze and I had to do a hard reboot. After that, black stripes appeared on the loading screen of Windows XP and after a while the signal from the graphic card was cut, putting the monitor into standby mode.

So I booted into Safe mode and behold - I was limited to 640 x 480 (4 bit colours) and fixed black stripes appeared everywhere on the screen.

After two hours I finally found the solutions - I had to remove the graphic card device from device manager, reboot into safe mode and reinstall the drivers. Only then the screen would clean up and I would get normal resolution back.

Thing is, when the screen was garbled, the little logo of Phoenix Corp. (a blue symbol in the upper left corner of the screen during RAM count) appeared to have black stripes as well.

Which stumped me, since obviously the problem was fixed by purging the drivers and reinstalling them. In the OS. When I reinstalled the drivers Phoenix logo went back to normal.

For the record, this is an old Athlon XP2000+ running on an ASUS A7N8X mobo with 2 gigs of ram, with GeForce 7600 GS Gigabyte

And yeah, the graphic card is probably close to being dead (I think that gc's RAM is screwed) and I will be replacing my computer anyway near January so I don't expect it to perform much longer. Still, what happened is a mystery to me since I always thought that OS graphic card drivers don't have any influence on the boot up RAM count screen.

EDIT: Oh, and the graphic card has never ever seen any overclocking.

[Vyraeth]

After that, black stripes appeared on the loading screen of Windows XP and after a while the signal from the graphic card was cut, putting the monitor into standby mode.

A few years ago I had graphical artifacts on the Windows XP splash screen, and I was told by someone who builds computers for a living that anytime artifacts appear on the splash screen it's nearly always the graphics card that's at fault. He was right too, because after I replaced the videocard, the system ran fine. I would surmise that's the case in your situation.

After two hours I finally found the solutions - I had to remove the graphic card device from device manager, reboot into safe mode and reinstall the drivers. Only then the screen would clean up and I would get normal resolution back.

Well, I wasn't actually able to get rid of the artifacts after they occurred on my machine, but I also didn't try reinstalling the drivers. I just had a feeling my graphics card was a goner after it started having issues running 3D games (i.e. graphical artifacts, crashing, etc.) - which led to the artifact on the splash screen, just as in your case.

Which stumped me, since obviously the problem was fixed by purging the drivers and reinstalling them. In the OS. When I reinstalled the drivers Phoenix logo went back to normal.

I'm hesitant to speculate on this because I'm not really familiar with the technical side of videocards and drivers, but I did ask my friend whose studying computer science and he thought it might be an issue between the vga controller and videocard. I asked him why the BIOS loading screen would be affected by a driver issue, and he thinks that the card might have reset to some sort of default, or had a setting locked that the driver changed.

It'll be interesting to see what certain people who are very knowledgeable about hardware on this board think, though.

[Tolya]

Okay, my GeForce 7600GS let its last breath today at 8:20 am. It was put in a plastic bag and awaits forensic analysis.

In the meantime, I installed my old Radeon 9500. Which should last until the next month when I can hopefully overhaul my machine.