Black windows with Nvidia and Compiz

hmm I dont have that problem. I have an HP dv9500 laptop with the nVidia GeForce 8600m GS and my screen resolution is the same as yours. I've been using Ubuntu since hardy 8.04 and now with Intrepid 8.10. I just use the normal restricted drivers from the repository.

maybe you can give us more information to try to duplicate the problem?

To duplicate the problem, just create a lot of large windows. Repeatedly opening Home in Nautilus works fine. It's a known issue, caused by the video card running out of memory, but I don't understand why it's still broken after years.

I also can't play videos unless I resize them to a very small size. I think both problems are related to a lack of video memory, but I don't think it should be limited in this way and I certainly don't think it should crash.

This question was expired because it remained in the 'Open' state without activity for the last 15 days.

I see a lot of rumors of this being fixed, but have not found any instructions that actually work for me. What's the best way to do this?

This sims to happen when a certain threshold of open windows is surpassed. I don't believe there is a fix for this as of now.

Still seems to be a problem in the latest greatest versions of everything. You can try enabling indirect rendering, but besides the performance slowdown this seems to cause eventual crashes due to lack of memory. YMMV.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=554662
http://forum.compiz-fusion.org/showthread.php?t=1762
http://en.opensuse.org/Nvidia_Black_Window_Bug_Fix
http://humani.st/ubuntu-nvidia-compiz-black-window-bug-fix/

Those instructions just raise the threshold a bit at best.

Meaning that it just delays the problem rather than solving it, right? So you can open more windows before they start going black, but they still go black eventually?

Is this a problem for any video card? If you open up thousands of windows on a card with more memory, will those eventually go black, too?

Seems like there's no fundamental reason why the textures can't be shuffled around in cooperation with main memory so that this never happens.

I have dual 256mb m8700 nVidias and my windows go black at around 20 windows open, specially if some evince windows have large PDF articles open.

Probably the problem is multiple desktops and viewports has raised our average open window number at work time and that might not have been predicted.

I have dual 256mb m8700 nVidias and my windows go black at around 20 windows open, specially if some evince windows have large PDF articles opened.

Probably the problem is multiple desktops and viewports has raised our average open window number at work time and that might not have been predicted.

I encountered this with a 256MB nvidia 6600GT AGP card when the 'AGP Aperture size' setting in the BIOS was set to a value lower than the amount of memory on the video card.