Trivia (LX) - Pro Advice

Just set up a new workstation with Windows 7 and the latest versions of Lightroom 4.1 and Silver Efex Pro 2. When I "Edit Photo in Silver Efex Pro 2" and choose a 16 bit TIFF as the export, I get these lines or bands in the image (see example attached to post). It seems particularly related to structure adjustments. This does not happen if I use 8 bit TIFFs, it functions normally. (I'm using sRGB color space and no compression.)
Also interesting is that I can see lines while processing the image, but when I save it back to Lightroom, the lines are in different places...
Has anyone else seen this? +Nik Software? Any ideas?

Michael Riffle, Google+
Jun 2, 2012

Thank you for contacting Nik Software. 

Silver Efex Pro 2 takes advantage of the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) of the computer system. The GPU is also sometimes referred to as the Display Adapter or Video Card, in any case they are all the same.Sometimes certain video cards will not handle this additional processing. You will note this when opening an image into Silver Efex Pro 2 and one or more of the following happens: 1.) Silver Efex Pro will crash right away, or 2.) If it opens the imported image will sometimes not be displayed correctly (solid gray, black or white image), or 3.) the buttons will not display correctly, or 4.) the responsiveness is simply very slow.
In order to resolve this, the first measure would be to update the Display Adapters or GPU driver.

[...] 

If after following the above steps, you are still experiencing the same issue, the next step will be to either disable the GPU (if possible) or force Silver Efex Pro 2 to not use the GPU (safe-mode). If Silver Efex Pro 2 states your GPU is not in use, the following steps may still be necessary to improve performance. In order to disable the GPU in Silver Efex PRO 2 please do the following:
If you are able to open Silver Efex Pro 2 and can see part of the interface, see if you can click on the"Settings" button in the lower left.
In Settings locate the section "GPU" and expand it, in this section you will see a check box "Enable GPU Processing", uncheck this so the GPU will be disabled, then close the settings window.
Close out of Silver Efex Pro 2 (click Cancel), quit out of any and all host applications (Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture), and then relaunch Silver Efex Pro 2 to see if this corrects this issue.

Nik Software Support, answering to Derek Greer
Jul 16, 2012