Quote from: Oshyan on October 13, 2008, 12:54:21 AM
I do know though that graphics drivers in Vista, particularly x64, have historically been problematic, particularly also in relation to OpenGL capability and compatibility. But again the fact that it works for me and others suggests there may be something else going on.
Yes, clearly. But, I don't know what that might be. I could try getting the 8800GT. However, I have read on forums that there are people having OpenGL troubles even on the 8800GT card when combined with Vista. So, it may simply be luck of the draw here that your configuration happens to work on Vista when others aren't quite so lucky. It's not as if I'm the only one complaining of this issue with Vista. One only needs to search Google to find myriads of forums with users complaining of OpenGL and video driver not responding issues.. both on Nvidia and ATI cards. I have even seen this issue span across operating systems and hardwares to affect even Mac OS X and Linux! This indicates that it may be a fundamental motherboard design/chipset issue in certain multicore motherboards. However, these non-Windows reported issues may be an anomaly and unrelated. But, I'm still not ruling out Vista entirely.
Quote from: Oshyan
One thing that does occur to me is that your power supply is pretty low wattage even for low-end cards these days. ... so if your PSU is really 300W it's far short of where you probably want it to be.
- Oshyan
Yes, however, I specifically chose this ATI card because the minimum recommended wattage for the card was listed as 300W. Yes, it's possible that my issue is related to low power issue. However if that were the case, I would expect to experience more problems with this system than I see. In fact, I have no other issues than this one OpenGL problem. I can watch DVDs, play iTunes, render images and do very CPU intensive things all without issues. On the other hand, I can trigger this video driver issue with a very specific set of circumstances which are exactly reproduceable. This indicates to me that it's more than likely a software issue instead of a hardware issue. I'm not ruling out hardware because I haven't changed everything possible, yet. Which software is at fault, I do not know. But, considering that Microsoft supplied an alleged fix to this EXACT problem in
KB938194, I'm leaning towards Vista still being the root cause for this issue.
I should also point out that I've been having OpenGL crashing on this specific machine since even Vista 32 with 3GB of RAM (3 sticks). Granted, this crashing issue didn't affect Terragen 2 in Vista 32, but it does affect Poser. It still affects Poser in Vista 64. So. after moving to Vista 64, I'm now seeing this OpenGL crashing issue now affecting ALL OpenGL apps. It's no longer just Poser. Although, I haven't been able to get Poseray to crash OpenGL for some reason (unless it's using D3D). However, I can't help but think that these issues between Vista 32 and Vista 64 are related in some way.
Basically, no matter what I have done, I have not been able to get rid of the OpenGL crashing problem on this Quad Core system (either in Vista 32 or in Vista 64) by any method (either hardware or software). The only common hardware things left to change are the motherboard, CPUs and/or power supply. So, this means I am not ruling out a CPU bug in the 6600 quad core chip, a hardware bus or fundamental ASUS design problem, and I'm not ruling out a PS change. But, frankly, with this specific machine, I don't think changing the PS is going to substantially change the issue and will just serve to cost me more money and expend more time changing it.
Finally, I should point out that people running XP do not seem to run into this issue.