Shademan

I have. I'd actually cleaned it thoroughly only a few weeks ago (I tend to do so roughly once a month), but I also did so while troubleshooting this. About a few weeks' worth of dust accumulation, really. No solid rings, no clogs. It's pretty clean, and I cleaned it again, for good measure. Setting PhysX to CPU so far is the only thing that has worked to minimize the issue.

Thanks! There may have been something to that! After setting PhysX to CPU, I was finally able to load up the scene that was pretty much guaranteed to crash before (I'd set it up with five lights in close proximity and a small environment, walls, textures, etc.) and actually walk around it multiple times without crashes, and with the framerate remaining decent even as I ratcheted the video settings up higher and higher. The artifacts still remain, however...flickering triangles briefly flashing through the air. They tend to disappear after about a minute, and seem, strangely enough, to be much worse on the lower light settings (if I set lighting to "High" they pretty much disappear)...If this is just some quirk of my setup and not a common problem, I suppose I can live with that, at least in the short term. They seem to show up in the editor viewport sometimes as well, also intermittently. Another minor issue that this seems to have revealed for me is that every time I restart the editor, all video settings except tesselation are automatically set to max. Not a big deal though (and may not even be a bug?), since it only takes a moment to change that. Anyways, I am not sure if the problem has been resolved in full, but the PhysX adjustment has certainly made it a good deal better. I guess I'll keep testing and keeping an eye on it.

Just ran the Unigine benchmark you linked with OpenGL and fairly high settings. Ran it twice because it was so...relaxing. No major framerate issues, no artifacts, no unexpectedly high temperatures, no crashes. Everything running as you'd expect. Then ran Leadwerks again, same scene as before, at lowish settings this time (turned antialising and anisotropic all the way down). It crashed the display driver within a few seconds...this was preceded by a lot of flickering artifacts.

That makes sense...I was really more concerned in the above comparison that the hardware was about to burn out/overheat, as opposed to drivers, but you're right in that the problem could well have to do with the way my card (current driver is 347.09) handles opengl specifically. I'm going to try the benchmark. Unfortunately, my happy/embarassed Update above was written too soon. As soon as I'd posted it, I tried to run that same map again, and it crashed so hard that I had to do a manual reset.

Thanks, all. Sorry I didn't mention my OS, originally. My PC is, in fact, running Windows. As for the card getting close to burn out, I monitor my temperatures compulsively and do a fairly thorough cleaning of the inside of my PC about once a month. My most recent cleaning was only a few weeks back, but I did go back in for another round today. Figured it couldn't hurt, especially since the GPU fan is in a bit of a hard to reach spot, and it was possible I missed some dust. Anyway, it was no dustier than what you'd expect after a couple of weeks of accumulation. Really pretty decent. Temperatures (according to both MSI afterburner and SpeedFan) remain nominal. In fact, because it's winter, they are actually below average for a relatively clean interior. I then decided to see if any similar crashed would occur when I tried to play a commercially released game. Probably the most "advanced" game I've got is Thief (the new one), which I already own on the PS4 but had picked up at a Steam sale specifically to see how my PC performs with what's considered "next" (or now current) gen graphics. It's definitely not a game I can or should run at absolute highest settings, but I did try, just for a sort of stress test. While it is basically a slideshow where FPS is concerned, it does actually run, with no crashes. With a few tweaks to the settings (turned off anisotropic filtering and tesselation, switched textures from very high to high, kept shadows and light same), the game began to run pretty well (about as well as the PS4 version), with occasional stuttering, but generally an average framerate of 50 fps. I played about an hour and a half with no issues, temperatures remaining well within expected range. I then started up lightwerks again, turned all setting fairly low (just to see if that was contributing to it), loaded up a simple scene with two point lights within reasonable distance of one another, had a crash (and Error code 7) within moments. I can reproduce this reliably with pretty much any scene with lights that overlap even a little bit. It's not specific to a particular map...again, Graphics card is relatively clean, relatively dust free, is not running hot, and plays recently released games that make heavy use of lights and shadow, as well all sorts of moving parts, without any unusual trouble... UPDATE: Okay, now I feel silly. My apologies. At least for this most recent test, it would appear that I had the anisotropic filtering in the editor set to something ungodly and astronomical...which I suspect was a slip of the finger, since I usually keep that setting down in most games. After fixing this, I am not getting similar issues. That may well have been the problem.

I hope this is the right place to ask this question. I don't think it's approapriate for bug reports, as I am sure this isn't a universal problem. Basically, my display driver has pretty good chance to crash when two lights so much as brush against one another, and when there is no crash, artifacts (flickering triangles floating in the air) tend to show up and the frame rate dips. Generally pretty simple scenes. One brush and two lights with a slight overlap seem to be enough to trigger it... This happens regardless of how high I set light quality/etc, and tends to happen with both static and dynamic lights. Is this engine just not for people with my video card/PC? I mean, this isn't a modern powerhouse, but I've got an Nvidia GeForce GTX 580, an older but still fairly capable card. I can still run most recently released triple-A games at high settings, and sometimes even on max, with few to no performance issues...I have not had any issues running any games recently - no indications of the card beginning to fail. I'm basically trying to stich together a fairly simple "walking simulator" to start off. Again, not doing anything too crazy with the lights. They literally just need to be near each other for this to happen. Is there something I am unaware of or missing? Something I should know to avoid? Is it just me? As I mentioned elsewhere, I am very much a novice, so I may just be doing something very silly somewhere. Or is the lighting in Leadwerks optimized pretty much exclusively for "next-gen" machines?

I'm a complete novice when it comes to Leadwerks and 3D development in general, so my apologies if this is a super basic issue or is properly addressed elsewhere (I searched for hours and couldn't find anything, but I may simply lack the terminology). As you can see in the picture below, which was taken within an unaltered "start" map, the shadows cast by solid objects (specifically those with prominent, sharp, 90 degree angles) tend to be a bit...off...there's a sort of "divet" between the actual edge where the shadow should begin and where it actually does begin. This makes all such objects look a bit like they're floating a few centimeters off the ground, even if they're totally flush or overlap with ground geometry. Is this just the way it is (a pretty undesirable effect, imo), or is there a way to amend that and make diagonal shadows behave properly? Is this something that can be done via scripting (something that I am still very new to in Leadwerks), or is it just a quirk of the engine that one must live with? Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated. Again, I tried searching, but simply couldn't find any mention of this.