Threads Crash and don't restart

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

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commorancy

#45
As a test, I replaced the 8400GS card with an ATI Radeon 3650 w/ 1GB GDDR2.  I had to download the drivers from AMD directly as Diamond (card manufacturer) didn't have the Vista 64 drivers on their site.  I installed the latest Catalyst suite that I downloaded and the card is working perfectly (for the moment).  Both Poser and Terragen 2 have no issues with OpenGL any longer.  The card supports HDMI and comes with a 5.1 audio driver, so that works for me.

I didn't buy the most expensive card as it would have required a 500 watt power supply and I didn't want to go through that hassle tonight.  This one works with my existing 300W supply.  So, for the moment, I'm quite happy with the purchase.  I might upgrade to a more expensive card later, but I won't be doing much gaming with this card and it should work well enough for the games I want to play.

Ok, so I spoke too soon.  While Poser seems to work with OpenGL (for the most part), I am still having issues with Terragen 2.  If I move the screen around the node area, the display driver stops responding and recovers in a very similar way to the Nvidia 8400GS card. This leads me to believe this may be a 64 bit Vista issue.  It may be related to SP1.  Alternatively, it may be some kind of strange bug between the 32 bit subsystem and the 64 bit graphics drivers.  Since both ATI and Nvidia cards behave in an almost identical way with completely different drivers and hardware, I'm leaning towards a Vista operating system problem as the root cause.  I find it unlikely that two completely different hardwares with two completely different drivers to have identical bugs.  The commonality, then, is the OS and the motherboard / hardware.  So, barring a fundamental design flaw in the motherboard (not likely) or a problem with the RAM (also not likely), the only thing left then is the OS.

I have found an MS KB article that describes a fix for 'video display driver not responding issue'.  I tried to apply it and the update told me it doesn't apply to my system.  So, I assume this fix is already in SP1.  I've also seen fixes not completely resolve the root problem.  So, I believe this is a Vista issue that is still unresolved.  Maybe MS will fix it in SP2.

--
Brian

commorancy

The good news, though, is that the 64 bit environment does resolve the 32 bit memory and thread crashing issues I was having.  The bad news is that Vista 64 is unstable when it comes to video drivers (no surprise there).  I'm happy that I can render larger images, but the crashing video driver thing is quite annoying.

I'm wondering if a natively compiled 64 bit version of Terragen 2 would experience these video driver issues?  My guess is that it may not.  So, is there any possibility of a native 64 bit version of Terragen 2?

Thanks.

freelancah

Have you installed all the latest vista upgrades? You also might wanna try updating your bios and every 64bit driver you can find. I can't really think of anything else than drivers or bios that can be causing this, since you already changed few components

jo

Hi Brian,

We're going to look at doing 64 bit versions after the TG2 final release.

Regards,

Jo

commorancy

#49
Quote from: freelancah on October 12, 2008, 12:26:10 PM
Have you installed all the latest vista upgrades? You also might wanna try updating your bios and every 64bit driver you can find. I can't really think of anything else than drivers or bios that can be causing this, since you already changed few components

I've updated everything I can get my hands on including the chipset drivers, video drivers, bios, windows, etc.  There's nothing left to update.  The reason I believe this to be a Windows issue is that I found a previous Microsoft KB article that's supposed to address this exact issue 'video driver not responding' (KB938194).  Apparently, the hotfix for this issue has been rolled into SP1 now.  But, it appears this update may not have completely fixed this issue.  Considering that this issue is present on two different video cards with two different video drivers, I have to rule out the drivers as the fundamental cause. My thought is that this is a Microsoft issue in Vista (or possibly in just Vista 64).  It may even be related to the 32 bit application connectors to the 64 bit drivers.

The only other issue is that this is simply bad hardware, but I have no reason to believe that this is the case as it only affects a very specific application situation.  If it were bad hardware, I would expect to see a lot more random problems across the board than a very specific reproduceable trigger.

commorancy

Quote from: jo on October 12, 2008, 04:58:39 PM
We're going to look at doing 64 bit versions after the TG2 final release.
Jo

Thanks Jo.  I'll be looking forward to it. 

-Brian

Oshyan

I run Vista x64 with an 8800 GTS with no problems like this. I don't think it is a fundamental TG2 flaw, nor necessarily even a driver flaw since I use the same drivers (although probably different configuration for my card). That it happened on 2 different cards from different manufacturers does seem to suggest it may *not* be specifically related to the card, but rather an OS or TG2 issue. However, as I said, it does work for me and for others I have heard from as well, all with varying configurations.

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.

One thing that does occur to me is that your power supply is pretty low wattage even for low-end cards these days. Although it seems an odd thing to be responsible for these issues, in fact power supply problems account for a great number of unusual computer issues. The minimum recommend for even basic systems now is 350W I believe, and 420 or above is encouraged, so if your PSU is really 300W it's far short of where you probably want it to be. A 500W PSU from a reliable manufacturer is pretty cheap these days and, particularly with the RAM upgrade (which will also increase your power use), you probably need it at this point. I know my own quad core with 8GB of RAM and the 8800GTS needed a 600W PSU with specific power ratings to really work consistently stable. Something to consider...

- Oshyan

commorancy

#52
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.

Oshyan

I see your points and it's clear you've done a lot of research on this which has led to reasonable suspicion of the OS and/or graphics drivers. I am inclined to think it may be a driver issue if anything. It's highly unlikely it is the motherboard or CPU, so if you do try one last hardware option I would try the PSU.

- Oshyan

commorancy

Quote from: Oshyan on October 13, 2008, 01:43:12 AM
I see your points and it's clear you've done a lot of research on this which has led to reasonable suspicion of the OS and/or graphics drivers. I am inclined to think it may be a driver issue if anything. It's highly unlikely it is the motherboard or CPU, so if you do try one last hardware option I would try the PSU.

- Oshyan
Yes, but I find it hard to believe that both Nvidia and ATI would introduce the same driver bug that affects OpenGL under identical circumstances.  The only way I can see this is if both manufacturers are using the same OpenGL code that is unmodified from the OpenGL consortium... I suppose that's possible.  Of course, that still doesn't answer the question of why it doesn't affect your system.

Thanks.

commorancy

#55
Thought you might be interested... When the video driver stops responding, this is what I see in the problem report after it recovers:

Description:
  A problem caused this program to stop interacting with Windows.

Problem signature:
  Problem Event Name:   AppHangB1
  Application Name:   tgd.exe
  Application Version:   1.9.99.1
  Application Timestamp:   4872d0aa
  Hang Signature:   df05
  Hang Type:   0
  OS Version:   6.0.6001.2.1.0.768.3
  Locale ID:   1033
  Additional Hang Signature 1:   c0b029542fe376389c305cfa4e89e179
  Additional Hang Signature 2:   7f34
  Additional Hang Signature 3:   5abc92dd1f0408cfbb2d7b6ed2d5b208
  Additional Hang Signature 4:   df05
  Additional Hang Signature 5:   c0b029542fe376389c305cfa4e89e179
  Additional Hang Signature 6:   7f34
  Additional Hang Signature 7:   5abc92dd1f0408cfbb2d7b6ed2d5b208

Note, it always happens in the node area after I create about 3-10 successive drag highlight rectangles both upper left to bottom right and bottom left to upper right.  I also drag the whole area around a few times as well for good measure.  It's sure to hang the driver.