14 DAY TRIAL // Users of Apple's latest iMacs have been reporting issues related to the video card for some time now and the problem seems to only be getting worse. While Apple is aware of the issue, there is no reliable fox at this time.
Although it is easy to see that the issues are related to the video card, pinpointing the exact cause is not as easy. Many of the affected users report that their display simply freezes, leaving them essentially computer blind until they restart the machine. While the display will not update, the computer continues to work fine otherwise, programs continuing to run as before and interaction still being possible, as long as you can do it without actually having any visual feedback. Other users are experiencing more severe problems that often crash everything requiring a restart, but these appear far less common. For some users, the problems are highly predictable and can be triggered simply by running visually intensive tasks such as iTunes visualizations or games. For others, they are less predictable, occurring only when the computer has been running for extended periods of time. In both these cases overheating seems the most likely culprit. A few of the users that use Boot Camp have also reported that they are experiencing the exact same issues in Windows.
While some people have been experiencing these problems from the get-go, others are reporting that their machines worked fine until they applied Apple's 1.1 iMac Software Update. A few users that have tried to manually rollback the drivers to pre-update versions are reporting that the problems are gone, however this fix is not universal. Whatever the exact cause, it is certain that these problems are related to the video card or the drivers. The extent of the problems caused depends on each user's needs and the extent of the issue. Some users that don't use visually intensive programs may never even notice the problem, while those who work exclusively with graphics may have a practically unusable computer.