Standby completely broken with Nvidia

[newbie01]

Hi, as written in the title I can't use standby at all with Win7 x64 and Pale Moon. I'm on a GTX 660 with newest drivers and with hardware acceleration on, as soon as the PC starts from standby, I get corrupted graphics on the tabs and eventually the well-known bluescreens. When I turn hardware acceleration off I get tons of black screen flashes when scrolling instead. I have lots of tabs open, in the 3 GB range usually, but that's the reason I switched over from Firefox, to have a browser that can cope with this. Will there be anything done about this?

[Moonchild]

If you're talking about "well-known bluescreens" then it's a good indication that it's not exactly Pale Moon's fault
Pale Moon, by definition, runs in user space. Hardware accelerated graphics are handled by, as the name suggests, the GPU -- all Pale Moon does is send data and textures to DirectX and indirectly to the video driver. It's obvious that the 64-bit video driver (that runs in system space where blue screens can occur) is having issues with resuming from standby, getting confused and eventually causing a blue screen. Pale moon at most exposes a problem in the driver here.

As for solutions or workarounds: best to ask NVidia support.

[newbie01]

I refered to them as well-known because you already mentioned them 3 years ago in that sticky, and sadly those issues are still present. And while disabling HW acceleration in Pale Moon seems to fix that issue, I wanted to bring attention to the fact that it causes a new issue in the form of that seizure inducing screen flicker. I don't know if that issue was already known on here.

From past experiences with bug reports or feature requests at Nvidia I don't feel like reporting this is going to help, and again, it's quite remarkable how the 64-bit video driver has been unstable for years now. Perhaps they still deem this too exotic to waste any more development resources on it.

[Moonchild]

I don't think they would be very interested, to begin with, because of the edge case (small-use browser in comparison, and occurring only with standby).
This may change if one of the big players, e.g. Firefox, starts publishing a 64-bit browser and tickling their driver the same way. it may also be limited to the particular card you have, as well.

One thing you could try is letting the video card do a POST on resume from standby, which would clear its internal state. Usually called "Video POST on resume" in the BIOS etc. It should be in your manual.

[newbie01]

Wasn't able to find that option on my Gigabyte GA-970A-UD3 board.

[megaman]

Wasn't able to find that option on my Gigabyte GA-970A-UD3 board.

I can't recall having any issues when I used sleep mode with my GTX 760. I used to have the GTX 660 and FX-4100 before upgrading to the 760 and 6300.
Now, I can test this because my mobo is also Gigabyte but the GA-78LMT-USB3F4.

If it pertains to the mobo, then I am not experiencing this issue, but I haven't tried Sleep Mode in so long because the computer would wake up on its own. (Weird, I know)
GTX 660 and 760 are Kepler, so the experience will be the same. I'll try a few more times because this is the first time, and with an SSD, I'll check if it does anything in the matter of your issue.

Happens every time you go to Standby?
I suggest a Disk Cleanup for trash, clean install of Nvidia drivers, check Windows Updates for anything, make sure any other drivers are updated.
Last but not least, Registry Repair your OS, as it could be a factor as well.

[Supernova]

but I haven't tried Sleep Mode in so long because the computer would wake up on its own. (Weird, I know)

Off-topic:
It is just he slept enough and was ready for a a new day ! What do you think ?

[megaman]

Off-topic:

It is just he slept enough and was ready for a a new day ! What do you think ?

Hehehe, yeah.

[newbie01]

Wasn't able to find that option on my Gigabyte GA-970A-UD3 board.

I can't recall having any issues when I used sleep mode with my GTX 760. I used to have the GTX 660 and FX-4100 before upgrading to the 760 and 6300.
Now, I can test this because my mobo is also Gigabyte but the GA-78LMT-USB3F4.

If it pertains to the mobo, then I am not experiencing this issue, but I haven't tried Sleep Mode in so long because the computer would wake up on its own. (Weird, I know)
GTX 660 and 760 are Kepler, so the experience will be the same. I'll try a few more times because this is the first time, and with an SSD, I'll check if it does anything in the matter of your issue.

Happens every time you go to Standby?
I suggest a Disk Cleanup for trash, clean install of Nvidia drivers, check Windows Updates for anything, make sure any other drivers are updated.
Last but not least, Registry Repair your OS, as it could be a factor as well.

It happens pretty much every time I start the PC from sleep mode, the tabs become corrupted and look normal again after drawing the mouse cursor over them. Haven't had the bluescreens in the last couple days, I think that mostly depends on how much tabs are open. I also use a SSD btw, an 840 Evo with degraded performance. CPU is a Phenom II X4 955, overclocked to 4 GHz admittedly, but the overclock is 24/7 prime stable so I don't think thats the issue.

[megaman]

It happens pretty much every time I start the PC from sleep mode, the tabs become corrupted and look normal again after drawing the mouse cursor over them. Haven't had the bluescreens in the last couple days, I think that mostly depends on how much tabs are open. I also use a SSD btw, an 840 Evo with degraded performance. CPU is a Phenom II X4 955, overclocked to 4 GHz admittedly, but the overclock is 24/7 prime stable so I don't think thats the issue.

I am going to cover some bases.
I've had BSODs while gaming, due to my overclocking(Stock is 3.5GHz with Turbo Core of 4.1GHz, but I've gotten BSODs with 3.7GHz while gaming, I think it's Nvidia to blame or Flash or STEAM), so it could be a factor.
I've already given you some solutions to try out. (I will try this Sleep Mode with the browser open. I hope that it is not culprit but it's worth a try.)

Off-topic:
Wow, I recently got, and first ever SSD, the 850EVO, what's degrading the 840?
Come to think of it, I've gotten the BSODs soley when I started using the SSD, could that be it?

Edit: Okay, I've put it to sleep twice and gave a visual look. The tabs look fine, unaltered.
I would ask if Nvidia is forcing FXAA on the browser but then you would have glitch on the tab section until it's removed, so that can't be it.

[newbie01]

But how many tabs do you have open? I tend to never close the browser, and right now it shows 3.4 GB in the task manager which is a lot compared to the average user I suppose. Performance obviously also suffers. The symptoms that I'm talking about are transparent tabs after wake up, which could also be related to the other thread about corrupted buttons.

About the 840 Evo: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8617/sams ... rmance-bug their fix wasn't permanent and now they are trying to get another one out.

[Moonchild]

"Never closing the browser" is not a good idea. You have to understand that you are loading document after document in it, with many of them having scripting, graphics, and more. You can expect some of those to be leaky (especially if you use extensions that may not clean up all compartments when closing a tab), so occasionally closing the browser and restoring your session will make for a nicer and lighter browsing session.

That being said, 3.4 GB is indeed a lot and usually points to a graphics driver issue when using hardware acceleration, especially if you don't go overboard on the amount of tabs you have open. Yet another indicator that something is amiss with the NV driver for you.
At this point I would simply suggest to switch over to the 32-bit version of Pale Moon to work around the 64-bit driver issues.

[newbie01]

I'd rather not go back to any 32-bit browser as that was my main issue with Firefox with heavy usage, the fact that it went black and crashed every time eventually. That's not present in Pale Moon x64.

We all agree that the NV driver is at fault, though it's still strange that disabling HW acceleration in Pale Moon causes these seizure inducing black flashes. I haven't tested it enough to say if it only happens with heavy usage as well, but I guess either it still performs GUI acceleration even without that option or it's a bug in Pale Moon, and behavior is clearly different from having HW acceleration on. So right now killing the browser task once in a while is the best solution for me short of changing my browsing habits, and I'd like to avoid Firefox x64 as well as I hate all the BS GUI changes in there.

[Moonchild]

Switching off HWA does not completely remove all acceleration. If it did that, then the browser would become likely unbearably slow. It will always use basic drawing acceleration (functionality that has been around for a decade or so).
But if it causes flickering even then, that means that either the driver is broken at a VERY basic level the moment it is put in suspend, or there is a hardware issue. If it was a bug in Pale Moon, then you would encounter this issue at all times, because Pale Moon does not care if a system is put in a standby state or not - that is done at a much lower level than Pale Moon operates.

Apart from suggesting to try different driver versions (latest might not always be best), there's not much else I can suggest, apart from making doubly sure you close the browser when you put the system in suspend (use Appmenu -> Exit or File -> Exit for that, to signal a clean shutdown instead of an implied one by closing the window(s)).

[megaman]

But how many tabs do you have open? I tend to never close the browser, and right now it shows 3.4 GB in the task manager which is a lot compared to the average user I suppose.

Depends on my mood. could be as low as 3(1 but with 2 pinned tabs) to over 300. I later use BarTab, or Suspend Tab, to keep the tabs from loading, only the ones I use.

Yeah, I would go days without closing the browser but leaks happen.(Mainly Flash)
As for your problem, did you check to see if your browser is using FXAA?
I see transparent tabs but that is because they aren't loaded, but that's how it works on my end.

Make a new Windows account and try there, just for test. Maybe try Safe Mode on your regular Windows account, could be an add-on or a Persona(skin/theme).
Have you tried my other suggestions?

[newbie01]

FXAA is off globally. Though I have a factory overclocked Asus card, and the whole boost concept seems like a possible source of instability as well compared to older cards. I sometimes do a simple 110% power target "overclock" (which doesn't make it boost higher than the regular 1149 MHz max in games, but sometimes helps staying at that mark), and it usually doesn't save those kinds of settings after waking up. I'm not really sure if it's related as Pale Moon doesn't make the card run at more than about 324 MHz though, and the overall cause of slugglishness with many tabs open certainly isn't related to GPU performance. CPU usage never spikes much above 25% even with the browser using about 4 GB RAM. I suspect these operations are still I/O bound even on a SSD, if the browser has to pull data from the pagefile constantly.

I don't use personas, as add-ons I only use ABL, Flagfox and PM commander, but I was already considering something to "unload" tabs. If one of these addons you mentioned actually unloads them from memory that would seem quite useful. Safe mode would just disable any GUI acceleration I suppose, or maybe use the generic video driver in 7, I'm sure that would fix it but it's not practical anyway. Don't understand what you mean by registry repair, and I usually do clean installs for the video driver already.

Does File -> Exit allow for session restore?

[megaman]

File > Exit does allow Session Restore. I use it as my Exit strategy.

The OC should affect me as well, so that couldn't be it. MSI GTX 660 and Gigabyte GTX 760, vendors couldn't be to blame nor Boost Clock.

I am with you on that, I also get hangs and sluggishness. I mostly notice this when I am watching tons of videos on YouTube, or Flash-related sites, and closing tabs don't liberate part of the clutter left by Flash. This shouldn't be pinned on the GPU.
Same can be said about CPU not climbing on usage, just RAM.

On SSDs, it's required that you disable the PageFile altogether.

[newbie01]

You mean because of wear? It doesn't concern me much, I have the 250 GB SSD for almost a year now and wrote 4.6 TB on it so far. According to tests these 840 EVOs are expected to do at least 100 TB without any issues, and I will probably have replaced it well before that anyway. I'm pretty curious to see if they can fix the read performance issues with old files though, but this will probably have been my last Samsung SSD anyway.

I have just 8 gigs of RAM, with heavy browser usage nearly 10 GB of that page file seem to be used, so disabling it doesn't seem practical at all.

Btw, another indicator of GPU driver instability is that sometimes Aero just turns itself off completely all of a sudden, and turns back on after a while...