Threads Crash and don't restart

Started by commorancy, August 01, 2008, 02:40:25 PM

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rcallicotte

Thanks commorancy.  If you wouldn't posting here or even in the Open Discussion session what your experience is, I'd really like to soak up that data.  I play games and use Poser and other 3D modeling programs and even DAZ Studio.
So this is Disney World.  Can we live here?

commorancy

Quote from: calico on October 07, 2008, 12:27:25 PM
Thanks commorancy.  If you wouldn't posting here or even in the Open Discussion session what your experience is, I'd really like to soak up that data.  I play games and use Poser and other 3D modeling programs and even DAZ Studio.


I've ordered everything I'll need to upgrade my system and hopefully it will all be here Thursday.  I plan to spend this coming weekend on the upgrade project.  It's too bad that it requires a full reinstall of everything (including apps).  There's no easy upgrade method from 32 bit to 64 bit.   So, that's why I expect it to take the entire weekend to get everything reinstalled and all my projects restored.

Thanks.

--
Brian

Oshyan

Both XP x64 and Vista x64 support running the vast majority of 32 bit apps without any problem. In addition, unlike 32 bit versions of Windows, 64 bit versions can allow a 32 bit application to take a full 4GB of memory to itself, provided that application has been compiled to be "large address aware" (which recent builds of TG2 have been). So I think if memory issues are holding you back, you will find TG2 under x64 a lot more capable. I use it on Vista x64 with 8GB of RAM myself and I've been able to do some insanely detailed scenes since the "large address support" was enabled - 10's of millions of detailed tree instances, *trillions* of polygons...

- Oshyan

rcallicotte

Let's see some of these, if you can.

Quote from: Oshyan on October 07, 2008, 10:37:35 PM
...I've been able to do some insanely detailed scenes...

- Oshyan
So this is Disney World.  Can we live here?

freelancah

I haven't had time to render another scene, but as Oshyan said: in Vista terragen  can use up to 4gb of memory.  In the first scene I was able to render the memory usage was around 2.85gb so I guess that was the problem atleast on my part

Oshyan

Quote from: calico on October 08, 2008, 08:33:43 AM
Let's see some of these, if you can.

Quote from: Oshyan on October 07, 2008, 10:37:35 PM
...I've been able to do some insanely detailed scenes...

- Oshyan
They aren't particularly exciting, just tests of high object counts. I'll show when I have something interesting. ;)

- Oshyan

commorancy

#36
Note, setting Max Threads to 0 and then rendering resolves the memory / thread crashing issue.  Clearly, TG2 renders much slower, but the single thread does not error out.  I ran a recent render where one thread crashed when using 4 threads.  Yet, when Max Threads value is set to 0, it renders without error.  One thing I did to try and speed up the render a little was force the affinity to one of the CPUs, then set the priority to 'Realtime'.  This way, it maxes out that one CPU of the four.

I haven't tried limiting the threads to 2 or 3 to see if that reduces the chance of error.

Thanks.

--
Brian

Balloon Lake

Flickr Page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/commorancy/

Oshyan

Please do try limiting the threads to 1 or 2. It may still be a memory issue since using more cores will take up more memory.

- Oshyan

commorancy

I'll give the two thread render a try next time I'm in 32 bit Vista.  I got the upgrade kit on Thursday and decided to upgrade it.  It actually went a lot faster than I thought.  Anyway, I'm running one if the renders on 64 bit Vista that was crashing on 32 bit Vista to see if it will now render.  As soon as it gets done, I'll boot back into 32 bit and try a 2 thread render.

Thanks.

--
Brian

commorancy

As an update... here's the status of the 64 bit Vista install.

I was able to get Vista 64 installed.  I re-rendered one of the previous scenes where threads kept dying in 32 bit Vista.  In 64 bit Vista, the render succeeded without any issues using all 4 threads.  Note that I installed not only Vista 64, but an additional 4GB of RAM for a total of 8GB of memory in the system.  So, apparently, with the scenes I was creating, somewhere along the way during the render, Terragen 2 is running up against a 32 bit memory limitation.  I'd like to see a fully native 64 bit compiled Terragen 2 to take full advantage of the 64 bit system. 

However, there is an OpenGL issue under 64 bit Vista that isn't present, to this degree, in 32 bit Vista.  The OpenGL library of the 8400GS Nvidia card drivers (in my system) is VERY buggy in 64 bit Vista.  Some OpenGL bugs also existed in 32 bit Vista, but did not affect Terragen 2. However, in 64 bit Vista, simply moving around in the node network (dragging the screen around) is enough to crash the Nvidia OpenGL library and, by association, Terragen 2.  This crash also leaves the entire video driver in an unstable state which requires a reboot. This OpenGL crashing issue is a known issue that Nvidia has been working on for several months now (and has been unable to resolve).  I ran into this issue with Poser originally.  Poser, however, thankfully supports SreeD (a software based OpenGL-type engine).  So, I can use Poser without crashing.

Note that I have the most recent Nvidia drivers installed from 9/25/2008 and these bugs are still present.

Apparently, this OpenGL driver crashing issue may affect many cards in the 8XXX series of Nvidia GPUs.  It may also affect other Nvidia card models outside of the 8XXX series.  The extent of this OpenGL bug in the Nvidia drivers is presently unknown.  According to SmithMicro (Poser), Nvidia is aware of the problem and they are working to resolve it.

At this point, I'm considering the purchase of another GPU for my system... most probably an ATI card where this OpenGL issue is likely not present.  I'll just need to find one that has HDMI and supports 64 bit Vista.

Thanks.

--
Brian

freelancah

Good to hear you resolved your rendering problem too. I just finished a second render succeffully at 1920x1200 resolution, so working fine here too.
I have a 8800 GT 512mb and I dont have the opengl bug you are describing and I really dont know if this is any help but you might wanna try these: http://www.omegadrivers.net/ they are slightly customised drivers which with luck, might work.

commorancy

Quote from: freelancah on October 11, 2008, 06:12:53 PM
Good to hear you resolved your rendering problem too. I just finished a second render succeffully at 1920x1200 resolution, so working fine here too.
I have a 8800 GT 512mb and I dont have the opengl bug you are describing and I really dont know if this is any help but you might wanna try these: http://www.omegadrivers.net/ they are slightly customised drivers which with luck, might work.

I'll take a look at those drivers.  However, searching '8800GT Crash OpenGL' on Google leads me to a post on NVidia's forum from a user complaining of crashes from nvoglnt.dll on Win XP when using Quake.  This post was from back in Feb 2008 and driver updates have been released since then.  But, this also indicates that the 8800GT may be susceptible to at least some level of OpenGL bugs.  Perhaps not the one that crashes Terragen, but it doesn't appear immune.  I've also found the OpenGL drivers to be a bit more stable under a 32 bit OS than a 64 bit OS. Is your 8800GT installed on your 64 bit Vista system?

I've also seen posts from users complaining of OpenGL crashes under MacOS X and Linux when using cards in the 8000 series.  Again, these drivers may have been updated since then.  Even still, my 8400GS still has these bugs even with the latest driver.  So, you'd think that if there are crashing problems being submitted to forums around the net related to OpenGL that Nvidia engineers would be working to fix it across the board.  I'm not seeing this from Nvidia.  A simple Google search reveals people experiencing OpenGL library crashes under Windows using 8000 series cards.

Thanks.

--
Brian

commorancy

#42
Quote from: freelancah on October 11, 2008, 06:12:53 PM
I really dont know if this is any help but you might wanna try these: http://www.omegadrivers.net/ they are slightly customised drivers which with luck, might work.

I have the Omega drivers installed now.  Poser still crashes in the same way when OpenGL preview is enabled, but now it says nvlddmkm is at fault and not nvogl.  Terragen 2 also triggers this crash and then closes as well.   BTW, this crash has the exact same appearance as the Nvidia supplied driver's crash, it's just that a different component is said to be crashing.  This bug is triggered in the exact same way and under the exact same circumstances as the OpenGL problem.  It appears that the Omega drivers are able to recover far better from this situation and not leave the drivers in an unstable state, though.

I am also seeing users posting about nvlddmkm crashing on Nvidia's forum (http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=25381) in 2007 without any real solution.  This issue appears to affect cards in at least 6000, 7000 and 8000 series and appears to only affect Vista.  It also appears that Nvidia may not have fixed this original problem and, instead, pushed the problem off to a different component (OpenGL) so that it appears to be an entirely new bug. 

Ok, after having dug some more into this problem, it may be a hardware and/or memory related issue combined with Vista.  See http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=32703.  It appears that this may have something to do with memory and chipset timings.  As part of this upgrade, I also installed DDR2 800 speed memory.  I upgraded it from 667 speed.  Although, I was still having OpenGL crashing issues even with 667 memory and even under 32 bit Vista.  Apparently, XP may not suffer from this exact problem.

I'm going to keep poking around on this one... although, maybe I'll get an ATI just for kicks (to see if it fixes the issue).

--
Brian

freelancah

So you have both 667 and 800 mhz memory running at 800mhz? With the timings of the old memory (that is if you didn't remove them before installing new ones). If so you should try to loosen the timings and/or lower the frequency to 667 mhz. Memory running at lower frequencys tend to have tighter timings than memory running at high freq. So that might be the issue if the new memory isn't able to handle the timings. Why it happens only on vista is something I dont know but it's worth checking.

Sorry for the messy text. I should be sleeping but still testing on few renders :D

commorancy

#44
Quote from: freelancah on October 11, 2008, 10:50:39 PM
So you have both 667 and 800 mhz memory running at 800mhz? With the timings of the old memory (that is if you didn't remove them before installing new ones). If so you should try to loosen the timings and/or lower the frequency to 667 mhz. Memory running at lower frequencys tend to have tighter timings than memory running at high freq. So that might be the issue if the new memory isn't able to handle the timings. Why it happens only on vista is something I dont know but it's worth checking.

Sorry for the messy text. I should be sleeping but still testing on few renders :D

I took out the 667 and replaced it with 800.  So, it's all 800.  The 4GB I previously had in there was all 667 (1GB sticks).  There's only 4 slots anyway, so I had to replace it all to get 8GB in there (2GB sticks).  I haven't tried going back to the 667 and running the crashing tests with only 4GB of memory.  I'm not sure it will affect anything, though.  I was still having OpenGL crashing issues even on the 4GB of 667 on Vista 32.  Can't remember trying it on Vista 64 before upgrading the RAM.  So, I'm not entirely sure it's a RAM + Timing issue.  It's not as if HP gives me fine grained control over the MB timings anyway.  So, basically, the MB just does whatever it does.

If it is the 800 that is the problem, the only solution is to replace it with 2GB sticks at 667.  But, I'm still not convinced that it's RAM timing issue.  I ran Memtest+ and it fully passed (took almost 2 hours to complete). I need to contact HP and make sure I have the absolute latest MB chipset drivers on this system.  I think I do, but HP's site is just not always the best at keeping up-to-date. 

Thanks.