Shademan Posted January 10, 2015 Share Posted January 10, 2015 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? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thirsty Panther Posted January 10, 2015 Share Posted January 10, 2015 Could you post a map so others could try it? Maybe it is a bug or maybe there is something in your script that is causing the problem. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gonan Posted January 10, 2015 Share Posted January 10, 2015 Are you running windows or linux? The requirements for Leadwerks for windows is OpenGL 4.0 compatible card, and yours is 4.2 so if your running windows the card should be fine. For linux and nvidia cards need to use the nvida driver. There is a warning in the Leadwerks system requirements about using intel drivers as they dont support OpenGL 4.0 on linux. If you can say what your OS and driver version is, you are more likely to get a relevant answer, there are some posts in the forums about supported drivers too. http://www.leadwerks.com/werkspace/page/drivers Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josh Posted January 10, 2015 Share Posted January 10, 2015 The card is fine performance wise, but it sounds like it's about to burn out. Open your PC case and clean the GPU fan with compressed air. I bet there is a huge solid ring of dust in the fan. Quote My job is to make tools you love, with the features you want, and performance you can't live without. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Imchasinyou Posted January 11, 2015 Share Posted January 11, 2015 DONT let the fan free spin when you do this, Damage could occur. If your handy and confident, you can remove the cover and use a natural bristle brush to clean it with and use compressed air for the fins of the cooler. Quote Asus sabertooth 990FX, AMD FX 9590 , Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit, 4 HDD's Western Digital Caviar Black set in Raid 0, 16 GB Crucial Ballistix Elite, Asus Radeon R9 270 X 4GB, Corsair CM750M, Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shademan Posted January 11, 2015 Author Share Posted January 11, 2015 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DerRidda Posted January 11, 2015 Share Posted January 11, 2015 What driver version are you running? Could be that the one you are using has some OpenGL issues. All the games you are comparing it with use Direct3D, so it's apples to oranges here. If you have Wolfenstein: The New Order or Rage try those, they use OpenGL as well. If you have neither of those try downloading any version of the free Unigine benchmark and let it run with the renderer set to OpenGL. This one for example: https://unigine.com/products/valley/download/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shademan Posted January 11, 2015 Author Share Posted January 11, 2015 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shademan Posted January 11, 2015 Author Share Posted January 11, 2015 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DerRidda Posted January 11, 2015 Share Posted January 11, 2015 That's a toughy. Nobody else is reporting Nvidia specific issues so far, I myself did use a GTX 650 Ti until recently and just upgraded to a GTX 970 without any critical issues but that's on Linux. The last difference between that benchmark and Leadwerks is that Leadwerks uses OpenGL 4 while the benchmark is on 3.2 so if your problem happens in one extension that only exists in 4.0 or newer you wouldn't see that. Could you upload your test map, preferably with the project you are using for it as well? My suggestion would be to completely remove the Nvidia driver in Windows' safe mode with the best driver removable tool you can find and then cleanly reinstall it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DerRidda Posted January 11, 2015 Share Posted January 11, 2015 Well, before going overkill, some duckduckgo-ing has revealed that turning off PhysX (setting it to CPU) in the Nvidia driver settings has solved a similar issue for other games. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shademan Posted January 11, 2015 Author Share Posted January 11, 2015 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josh Posted January 11, 2015 Share Posted January 11, 2015 Have you opened up your case and looked at the fan? Quote My job is to make tools you love, with the features you want, and performance you can't live without. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shademan Posted January 12, 2015 Author Share Posted January 12, 2015 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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