CS4 bug: brush cursor display is incomplete

Maybe in the light of the perceived problems they would be prepared to stretch a point. Or you could always appeal to John Nack!

And, therein lies the problem. Adobe engineers have made us rely on the competence of the various video card manufacturers to update their drivers so that CS4 will work.

Said engineers were lured into the trap of "Hey, this is cool, let's make it happen!"

Unfortunately, they haven't made it happen for a great many of us who bought the program. Yet, they blame it on the video card manufacturers.

If I could return this program, I would. Unfortunately for me, I tried to work it out with said engineers during my 30-day return period, which has expired.

Dear Photoshop Engineers,

I just wanted to try out Photoshop CS4 and have to say that this behavior is quite odd. I understand that it is a fault of the graphic card drivers, but please also understand the many customers of Notebooks. Notebook graphic cards from NVidia do NEVER have direct support from the manufacturer, the only support we lads get is over our supplier of the notebook (be it Dell, HP or whatever).

These suppliers will NOT update our drivers specifically for our notebook/graphic card for only one program - that is the annoyance with notebook graphic cards. The only way is to use "hacked" drivers from third parties which might result in system failure.

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I would like to know what performance decrease I will have with the following settings, each making the cursor display WORK CORRECTLY:

Running Windows XP SP3 with a NVidia GeForce 8400M GS driver version 156.83 on a Dell Vostro 1400.

1. Go to Control Panel > Display Properties > Settings > Advanced > Troubleshoot and set Hardware acceleration to one step below full. It says "Disable cursor and bitmap accelerations". --> cursor display works
My question: What does this do outside of Photoshop
1.1 I can enable Photoshop Settings > Performance > Enable OpenGL Drawing
My question: Does is actually use the OpenGL drawing now or is it disabled?

2. Apply the Registry "fix" posted by Adam Jerugim AllowOldGPUS_ON.reg. (Windows hardware acceleration settings back to full hardware acceleration) Restart Photoshop --> cursor display works
But here comes a problem:
2.1 I cannot enable OpenGL Drawing in Photoshop! Once I do that the cursor reverts back to the "clipping" behavior.
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Again: I KNOW this is a problem of the graphic card manufacturer (NVidia), I just think that either you should alert the customers on how to fix this behavior or think of a workaround. All users being stuck with mobile NVidia graphic cards (I guess that's a lot) will probably NOT receive any updates for their drivers (e.g. official Dell drivers for my graphic card are from 07-12-2007).

I just want to check... before trying the AllowOldGPUS_ON.reg ... that if Nvidia do actually fix the driver that will correct this cursor problem, will using the AllowOldGPUS_OFF.reg reset the registry back to it how it was?

Here's the link to the optional GPU registry keys for CS4:

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/thankyou.jsp?ftpID=4056&fileID=3769

What's worked for some people is to try using the AllowOldGPUS_ON.reg key. To use it, download the zip archive from the above link and double click on that specific registry key - DO NOT use the other registry keys unless you feel confident that you can get things back to default settings. Using the AllowOldGPUS_ON.reg key will not disable anything in the application.

Once you've enabled the registry, quit and re-launch CS4.

This has helped some people who have reported this problem.

-Adam

My video card maker does not support me.

nVidia does not directly support the video card in my laptop and my laptop manufacturer appears to not care either.

That meant my choice was either: return Photoshop CS4 as "broken" on my laptop, or buy a new laptop.

Luckily one of your engineers offered the registry setting to me before I succumbed to the "return CS4" choice.

If you don't have access to the registry setting, I'd be happy to send it to you. Maybe you could offer it to others in this forum that are in the same boat I was in before they return the software.

Nothing is being pushed under the rug. I'm telling you the facts. We're trying to work with customers to find and fix these issues. We've been working with the video card makers for years to get these issues fixed -- but it is up to them to deliver the updated drivers.

And I don't know of any magic registry setting that can fix a broken video card driver. The most we can do is say "ignore all the errors and assume the video card works correctly, whether it really does or not" (allow old GPUs).

Again, we're trying to help our customers.
But we do not have details of the video card circuitry or programming, we do not have source code to the video card drivers, and we are not setup to certify and release video card drivers (Microsoft has interesting procedures and requirements).

If your video card maker has not yet fixed the bug - let them know, so they can address the bug in the model specific and OS version specific driver that you need.

It's so nice to push things under the rug like that.

nVidia's bug or not ... Adobe has a way (via a registry setting) to "work around the bug" and it's a shame that they would rather push it under the rug than help their customers out.

If it weren't for the registry setting I would have asked for my money back from Adobe already because CS4 is basically broken on my laptop. And still, to this day, neither the laptop manufacturer nor nVidia have produced a fix.

Why let a little thing like this render a $699 package unusable when distributing the registry setting could potentially help the customer instead? Wouldn't you rather have happy (instead of irritated) customers?

Mark - the incomplete cursor problem is an NVidia driver bug. Adobe can't fix it.

Paul,
Yes; this issue appeared during beta and, no, it was never fixed. :(

Mark