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This issue is actually a dupe of
criteria: Windows Vista, nvidia graphics, 1.20 rc viewer
For others reading/voting on this JIRA More on the driver issue. It's really important to note what driver version you have, as we think it directly bears on this issue.
Please ensure that you have the latest nvidia drivers. Thanks! OK all...
I just install all the latest Vista drivers - including the latest NVidia Driver. I also upgraded to RC6. I hoped many the latest NVidia driver would fix it. Well withing 10 minutes I went to help island and after standing there 5 minutes my screen freaky by flickering at me wildly for about 15 seconds then I got the video driver not responding error then crashed. A report log seems to have been sent to LL at 18:51 CDT. I logged in again to the same place at help island. As soon as i logged in the exact failure happened again. the failure seemed to log up to LL again. The latest NVidia driver I just upgraded to is.... Release Date: 2008-03-25 Version: 7.15.11.7432 A I have an NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS Well the latest NVidia driver and the latest RC viewer combo has really made this problem show up a lot more. Just happened again. I was in from of a flame script. all was good until i click the flame controller script to turn off the flame.... and CRASHED. at 19:57 CDT
Toy OK.....
here is a first..... I crashed with the same flickering screen and the video driver not responding while using my 1.19.4 viewer. That is the first time with version 1.19. Things are much worse with the latest NVidia driver!!!! grrrrr Ok.. so my night ended last night with so many crashes on both the RC and 1.19.4 (more crashes on RC) that I lost count.
I am having a feeling that because I was much more stable with my older NVidia driver then I am now, maybe the LL developers have older or legacy Nvidia graphics comments embedded into the viewer that the new drivers are crashing on when they receive these older / conflicting commands. what I would really like to know is if there are any SL users with Nvidia cards and much older graphics drivers and if they are encountering any of these issues. If my theory is correct, those users with older graphics cards and outdated drivers (I am sure there are lots out there - I have just asked a SL friend how old her nvidia card and driver is - she never has these problems) will not crash - even with the newer RC viewer because the older code in the newer viewers wont clash with their older drivers/command sets. Just a thought! Toy (PS - I edited my earlier post because I thought I had upgraded to SP1 of Vista - but in fact I have not). I talked to my friend that has an nVidia 7300 and her system and respective video drivers are dated back to last summer. She has done no upgrades to her system or drivers. she gets ZREO of these effects of the viewer crashing with that "video driver not responding" or any of the freezes.
old coding instructions clashing with newer Nvidia drivers? Happened to me again. I got the video driver error and subsequent SL client crash. I have never had the whole PC crashing tho
NVidia Driver version: 7.15.11.6925 Second Life 1.20.6 (86925) May 6 2008 20:43:54 (Second Life Release Candidate) You are at 276571.4, 297807.5, 24.5 in Rangitoto located at sim7162.agni.lindenlab.com (8.10.144.164:13001) CPU: Intel Core 2 Series Processor (2393 MHz) I am having this happen all this time. I am on the latest driver and the RC viewer just will not let me use it. Which is a real shame because i really like the new UI.
I have had this problem ever since a few days after the first "dazzle" viewer was released. My environment: (it is Vista 64bit) Second Life 1.19.1 (4) Apr 2 2008 11:59:37 (Second Life Release) Ok all... I got some lear progress....
As I mentioned, since upgrading my laptop to the latest Nvidia driver, both my RC6 and my 1.19.4 viewer were crashing constantly. In frustration, I went back to the advanced graphics parameters and disabled the ATMOSPHERIC SHADERS Ever since disabling it, I have not crashed with eith client all night and for 2 hours today. I should have crashed many times already. Disabling that parameter so far has stopped the video driver crashing. I will keep trying with this setting diabled on the new RC6 Toy! Second Life 1.20.6 (86925) May 6 2008 20:43:54 (Second Life Release Candidate)
You are at 288803.3, 280419.2, 443.2 in Synister located at sim4848.agni.lindenlab.com (216.82.27.59:12035) CPU: Intel Pentium III/Pentium III Xeon (0.25 micron process) with external L2 cache (2493 MHz) Driver Version (from HP) 7.15.11.7432 - currently I have tried 2 SL Clients and two sets of driver from HP.... all crash me to a blue screen of death with the message at the top IRQL_IS_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL... I could probably quote most of the rest of the page I have seen it so often I;m due a crash... I had better hit the add button ^^ added to above,,, atmospheric shaders and avatar imposters were both off...
I see the periodic freezes with the RC client... I will have to set aside time to see how much worse it gets and whether it eventually crashes; so far, I've either gotten fed up with it and relogged with the release client, or had to sign off to deal with RL.
At first, all is well, but after a while, the client starts freezing for short intervals; the freezes start to happen more and more often as time goes on. Configuration: Second Life 1.20.6 (86925) May 6 2008 19:36:48 (Second Life Release Candidate) CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5400+ Update status...
I used the new client again for several hours yesterday and near the end of the night I encountered 1 "video driver not responding" error which although it was disappointing, the number of video driver crashes after turning off the atmospheric shading is almost like it stopped. To show if it truly is that parameter - today I will re-enable the parameter and see if the crashing starts up again. Toy Unlike to Toy, I have noticed no difference in the frequency of crashes after turning off avatar imposters and atmospheric shaders. I still crash to a blue screen about 5 times for every SL crash that nets the "driver stopped responding and has recovered" message that forces SL to a not responding state.
Thank you, Periapse, for your attention to this Added internal JIRA number.
News: We are holding off the release of 1.20 viewer. Instead we decided to merge the thread watchdog into this branch and do a few more revs of RC to try to bring down the crash rate. The thread watchdog is new, and will likely take a couple tries to perfect, but it will allow us to gain some insight on when other threads fail. The particular "driver stopped responding" problems should be detected by the watchdog, which will give us a call stack. Here's a new twist... I crashed out of windows the usual way while SL was minimized - but the only program running... sigh
The hangs and the pauses in the system, for PC Vista users lead to the graphic card hang and eventual crash.
Second Life 1.20.6 (86925) May 6 2008 20:43:54 (Second Life Release Candidate) You are at 261719.0, 256687.1, 525.5 in Skiddaw located at sim5390.agni.lindenlab.com (8.2.33.137:13001) CPU: AMD (Unknown model) (2211 MHz) Last night I turned off my Atmospheric Shading and I did not crash for 3 hours until around 9:30pm SLT. Then I crashed on 3 occassions in very short order. In every case it did ask me to send a crash log of which i said yes - but i am not sure if any of the crash logs are ever sent to LL as I am instantly placed into the login screen.
SL was once again highly unstable last night with the Asset Server problem after 9:30pm but I for as long as i was able to stay logged in - I did not get a "video driver crash" subsequent to disabling the Atmospheric Shader. When is the RC with the thread watchers code going to be released? Toy This issue may boil down to nvidia drivers. Especially with Vista nvidia has been constantly tweaking the drivers. Unfortunately many of you are using OEM drivers, and those are rarely updated and rarely seem to have the latest fixes.
For those of you who use nvidia's own drivers, or those who wish to abandon your OEM drivers and try nvidia's latest: http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x86_175.16_whql.html If you do download this driver, please check the product compatibility tab first, and if you are replacing your OEM's driver with the GeForce one, check to see if your OEM will still support that configuration. Some OEMs put users in a bind by not supporting any drivers other than their own, but yet don't update drivers frequently enough to fix identified bugs. Of course, you can always revert to an OEM driver if you need to. Hi Periapse,
Unfortunately for us users that have Laptops with motherboard integrated video chipsets and drivers, we do not have the option of using the NVidia generic drivers. as was just clipped right from the NVidia support page... "The GeForce M series and GeForce Go series notebook GPUs use drivers that have been customized by the notebook manufacturers to support hot key functions, power management functions, lid close and suspend/resume behavior. NVIDIA has worked with some notebook manufacturers to provide notebook-specific driver updates, however, most notebook driver updates must come from the notebook manufacturer. Additionally, the desktop GeForce graphics drivers will not install on Geforce M series and Quadro M series notebook GPU's." We must rely upon the OEMs to release these drivers. The thing is that the OEMs might be behind NVidia in releasing their customized versions of the drivers (in the case for HP - their latest driver is from February), BUT and this is a big BUT.... application developers - specially gaming and online applications that have intensive use of the graphics resource on a PC should have policies in their development that restrict the use of any new command sets that have been released within a period that would not allow the vast majority of OEMs to integrate these new features or commands. LL development in this case should not have included the use of commands that are so new to NVidia that the OEMs have not deployed them. I think LL shoudl take the position that STABILITY trumps NEW FEATURES. I would rather have a SL viewer that may be missing a couple of new/cool features but is rock solid stable. From my short period of time as a SL resident and as a person in the enterprise IT industry, I have gotten the impression that LL still is holding of culture of being wrapped up in "WHATS COOL" and has not matured to a stage in their evolution where Quality Service and Stability are as important. You can easily see this evidence in how many new viewers and features and upgrades are being released. A new viewer and upgraded functional products are released way to quick - which generates the clear outcomes of the numerous Grid instabilities and viewer bugs etc that the residents of SL have to suffer with. I hope that LL moves to their next phase of company maturity which focuses on providing their customers a stable environment and quality service levels more so than trying to glitz everyone with the latest cool feature / viewer. Summary... get rid of an graphics based features that use graphics command less than 1 year old. Just my thoughts on this! Toy Also people using computers like mine, a Macbook Pro running OS X with the 8600M GT chipset, we don't have the ability to use generic nvidia drivers either. There aren't any for OS X. But we get the drivers crashing and in the case of OS X, the whole thing locks up and requires a hard boot.
Last night this happened to me 4 times in the span of about 20 minutes. I've tried to submit crash reports when possible, but the crash reporter's not working and even if it is, when I have to power off/on, I'm sure the stack info is gone when it does work upon running SL again. It definitely seems to be a function of texture load/moving the camera through avatar movement or flycam. I emailed HP.... (make of my 'puter) and requested they update drivers with the link provided as reference - for what little good that will do...
in the meantime.... is it coincidence that I have never had one of these crashes while running on battery? Or has someone an explanation? I have the power settings so that the screenisn;t as bright, blahblahblah...... (now that I have typed this i just know I will be eating my words) I began seeing this for the first time in Vista tonight (this morning really). I get some stutter-y sound and display action and then, sometimes quite a bit later, a crash that blanks the screen until Vista manages to recover with a message that the a video driver has crashed. Will update this when I can manage to read the message as it flies by.
Coincidentally, this seems to have happened at the same time I had to run a registry patch program to reset and recover the drivers for my Optiarc DVD RW AD-7201S5 drive that came as part of the original setup. The machine is just over a week in my hands. Since there's some other oddness happening here, I do wonder if the patch didn't also do something to the drivers. Will update this if a review of drivers and cabling changes things markedly. I had been getting a similar heap crash documented in the appropriate Jira issues, and the same error messages crop up here too as the issue resolves itself. In my case Vista does manage to recover from these crashes more or less smoothly. re jeaniesing trilling's comments, my rig is also a fairly new HP Pavilion Media Center m8430f desktop machine. As a desktop hopefully the NVIDIA GeForce drivers from NVIDIA will be compatible and hopefully clear up what the registry changes seem to have uncovered for me. Also, I just now discovered that, at least with SL running, the NVIDIA Control Panel also has a tendency to crash. Sysinfo from followup login: Second Life 1.20.6 (86925) May 6 2008 20:43:54 (Second Life Release Candidate) You are at 286240.8, 265509.9, 102.6 in Huineng located at sim5839.agni.lindenlab.com (8.2.35.141:12035) CPU: Intel Core 2 Series Processor (2399 MHz) ...the battery thing? Coincidence.... I knew I would jinx it by thinking it aloud.
Have you considered removing NVidia from the list of recommends? Or perhaps a warning to those who would purchase machines similar to ours that are having problems? My sole purpose for purchasing this model, this machine, was SL... and on the advice of the page listing system requirements. I feel as though Periapse's last post disavows any LL responsibility for the crashing issue, and definitely feel as though I have been misled into buying an incompatible video card/machine.... if nothing else, saying on the secondlife page that HP is not recommended at this time MIGHT fuel then to fix the available drivers... I will say that i logged a ton of SL hours over the weekend and i have kept the atmospheric shaders option off and I have only crashed 2 time this whole long weekend. Its not perfect as the "video driver" error does still rear its ugly head but right now it is far from my my main issue with the Viewer.
The bigger issue is how the viewers slowly consume memory real and then I think the virtual until near the end of the night a RELOG is required (as the system become horrendously lagging and freezes) where I can see my hard drive run constantly for a couple minutes immediately after the logout (I have concluded it is the system dumping the cache or virtual memory). But this issue is being tracked on another Jira (mind you not actively). But again, for me on this issue, I am hoping that an upcoming release of the Viewer will find the root cause to the NVidia driver problem so that I can re enable the atmospheric shader and not worry about NVidia driver related instability. And I do hope LL rethinks their policy on OEM drivers not being something they should seriously consider when developing and deploying new functions and features. It would be a true sign of an IT company's maturity toward a more rock solid and stable service offering and product to its customers. Cheers!!! Toy Time for an update or two...
Those of you not saddled with OEM drivers should definitely update to the May 13th nvidia driver. I started using it when it was still beta (my Dell XPS Vista box at home) and I have never had any crashing or hanging. Toy, and others at the mercy of Dell, HP, etc: The devs working on the render pipeline do not use any card specific, recently added, functionality. For the reasons you mention they try to go for basic OGL functionality. If certain hardware gives advantages, it is presented with a Preferences switch to turn it off/on. In particular, I know of no new card functionality being utilized between the 1.19.1.4 release viewer and the 1.20 series. Instead, I think this is a result of simple bugs in the nvidia drivers, which some render pipeline changes in 1.20 exposed. NVidia has been bug fixing ever since they released those famously broken GeForce drivers for the launch of Vista. The newest drivers are finally compatible with the current crop of hot games. But OEM vendors typically expect that video drivers are stable, and only rev them rarely. This strategy just doesn't work for the Vista nvidia drivers. They need to change their policy and start matching the nvidia releases. We have contacts at HP, Dell, Apple and are doing our best to inform them of problems and get them to update their drivers. Jeaniesing – thanks for writing to HP about the drivers. If/when we actually find a card and OEM where SL will not run at all, or crashes consistently, we do indeed list it as not supported: http://secondlife.com/corporate/sysreqs.php The new viewer rc7 comes out tomorrow. It features the thread watchdog which we hope will (a) turn freezes and hangs that typically now force a reboot into ordinary crashes and (b) give us thread specific information on that crash. If this isn't "Crashes consistently" then I am uncertain what is.
My shaders and imposters have been off for the duration... I moved from the regular client to the RC after reading the earlier jira thread that implied there were fixes in the RC. There are times when i will go several hours with no problems, but yesterday, not so much. I was in for 5 minutes and crashed out of Vista, logged back in to finish the conversation and crashed before anything had rezzed... twice..... logged in again and crashed after a few minutes... then gave up and pulled out my old machine to access SL and finish the conversation. In addition to feeling duped by the LL recommendations, I agree with Toy in feeling 'left behind' by Linden Labs and questioning, for the first time, the professionalism of the company. I wonder how many folks with OEM drivers, and without a vested interest in the game, have simply given up without even realizing the jira exists. Periapse, it's great to see that that LL are looking at this.
I hope I don't muddy the waters, but I have seen what I believe is this same crash a couple of times with XP on my home PC
I agree that it seems to be a Driver issue; I have tried lots of different ones, I think I found that one of the older ones was more stable (will check version when I get home - maybe 169.73?) but am looking forward to trying the new one Periapse mentions above, and the new RC when it comes out today. Toysoldier: "I would really like to know is if there are any SL users with Nvidia cards and much older graphics drivers and if they are encountering any of these issues" - GeForce 6600LE and 169.73 My specs: thanks Periapse for the update!
Last night I had another NO CRASH night (7hours straight) with my OEM's NVidia driver from HP for my 8400M GS video card and with the Atmospheric Shaders disabled and running on Vista SP1. I dont know if that helps anyone else, but it surely seems to have been the factor to prevent the NVidia crashes (only happened a couple times in days). Once the new 1.20.7 is released and I install it, I will remove the atmospheric shading and allow myself to crash. Thanks Periapse for the explanation on the NVidia drivers and the OEM issue and I hope LL puts a lot of pressure on HP. I think I will call HP Suppoort and log a call myself so it can be recorded in their system. It is strange though Periapse that you mention that no new graphic card functionality has been released in the 1.20.x viewers from the more stable 1.19.x releases and yet the NVidia problems for me started showing up when I used the 1.20.x viewer (that was until I upgraded my HP OEMed NVidia drivers - then even the 1.19.4 viewer started crapping out much more and both were worse). Anyway, to all you voters and watchers with OEM graphic cards - CALL YOUR VENDOR and register a support call on this video driver. Tell them you need to have them upgrade it to the latest General releaeed NVidia driver. Cheers! Toy I just updated to the Dell Nvidia drivers for my XPS420 dated 24/3/2008 driver version 7.15.11.7474 .
Since then RC7 won't even load without crashing and the public release client is now also crashing with the same video error. CPU: Intel Core 2 Series Processor (2393 MHz) Hey all...
Absolute... if you have a desktop which from the model of graphics processor makes me think you are, then Periapse is suggesting that you might use the fgraphics driver offered right from NVIDIA that was released only a week or two ago. It is suppose to fix the bug. Worst case is that you can re-install the older driver if this latest NVidia driver causes grief. The experience you encountered that has even extended to 1.19.4 was extactly happened to me - until I turned off my atmospheric shadding. AS FOR ME... Two nights ago I installed the latest RC of 1.20.7 but I have not yet re-enabled the Atmospheric Shading to see if I will crash. I have not crashed with it disabled. I DID find a new bug related to the 1.20.7 which maybe Periapse can pass on to the developers.. and which has been so annoying that I switched back to the 1.19.4 version... The public chat has lost all the Cariage Return and Line Feeds behind your chat entries. This causes the next public chat line to append immediately after the last character of the line you submitted. when I went back to 1.19.4 the problem went away. Example of what it looks like to me in chat: Toysoldier Thor: HI THERE HOW ARE YOU?Periapse Lindon I would have to assume that this little new bug will have been caught very quickly since its so annoying and visible. Tonight I will re enable the atmospheric Shading and see how it goes - if the crashing starts again. Cheers! Toy On May 13 Nvidia drivers and RC8 now - logged in and all working fine so far
Over the weekend I had a few of the NVIDIA driver crashes - most of them were when I ENABLED the atmospheric shading, but I did have one last night with it disabled and what I was doing was opening up an explorer window on my computer while in SL.
Good news is that it seemed to have sent a CRASH LOG every time so you Developers should have a lot of evidence of the crashes from me. I am sure you can search through all the crash logs you receive to find the ones from me. GOOD LUCK! PS - I think I am going to uninstall and reinstall my RC8 as I cannot get rid of that annoying public chat bug losing linefeeds unless I go to the older veiwer. CHEERS! Toy Second Life 1.20.8 (88152) May 22 2008 15:26:00 (Second Life Release Candidate)
CPU: Intel Pentium III/Pentium III Xeon (0.25 micron process) with external L2 cache (3000 MHz) Nvidia Driver Version: 175.16 its still crashing edit: looks like DISABLING the atmospheric shading prevents the crashing - SL runs now smooth nothing has changed for me... I still crash regularly with those shaders disabled....
give it up... the atmospheric shaders are not the problem, if you turn them off anf have a run of good luck you get all sorts of false hope... then you crash and will crash again. My only false hope is that LL will release an old version so that I don't crash..... ....or that HP will actually update the drivers before 2008 ends. ok erm still crashing with 1.20.9
as jeaniesing trilling said, if you have luck then it runs for 3 hours and more only Second Life 1.19.0 (5) Feb 28 2008 17:18:12 (Second Life Release) is the last one which is stable for me ... I am currently crashing with both 1.19.1.4 and 1.20.9
With NVIDIA drivers 169.25 then the driver appears to crash and recovers. In both cases it is within 5 minutes, but usually MUCH sooner. SL is effectively unusable and has been for several weeks. I will attach a zip file containing DXDIAG output and Secondlife log files from a 169.25 crash. NB - When 175.16 drivers were first released the English version appeared to install but didn't actually update the driver. You can check by openning the NVIDIA control panel and clicking "System Information" in the bottom left corner. Solution is to re-download the driver and reinstall. (They appear to have replaced the English version with a corrected International version.) Crash info including DXDIAG and SL log files to assist debugging.
i dont know if its helpful but sometimes i'm running SL and WoW at the same time in window-mode.
if the driver crashes only SL crashes but WoW keeps running ... maybe you can implement some restart-engine-if-it-crashes-function like in WoW ... ... at least i'm still running 175.16 because all the older driver-versions dont support my 9800 Gtx ... 1.19.0.4 = no crashes Still not fixed in 1.20.10.0 - I've attached a crash report in case this is different / helpfull.
NB - hey LithiumIon Aeon
please try the 175.12 betadrivers from nvidia http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x86_175.12.html i have a guess and want to test if its correct... my 1.20.9.10 runs for over 5 hours with these drivers LithiumIon – Your crash is different from the one on this thread. This is for the Vista "driver has stopped working..." message in 1.20 RC. But in your case you are getting crashes even with 1.19.4 – which has been stable for others.
I'll look at the info you've submitted today, in case I can glean anything. Have you tried disabling atmospheric shaders? playing 1.20.10.0 with 175.12 beta driver seems to be stable for me
 Tried the 175.12 betat drivers and get the same result as the 175.16 drivers.
Periapse, if this is soley an Nvidia issue.... a graphics card issue... why do I get the same crash when SL is entirely minimized?
I have tried it on several versions of the browser including 1.19.0 (5) that was successful on others' machines. I cannot update drivers as it is a laptop... my last crash (#5 for today, I think) was interesting... first my avatar disappeared but attachments remained (that's new!), then the game window flickered (that's old), then the screen went black..... I was reaching for the screencap controls but only caught the "video driver is not responding" error.... bummer...
I have resolved my issue. I have replaced my PC power supply and 1.20.10.0 was stable for over an hour.
Some things I learnt along the way... A stable PC browsing the Internet <> a stable PC running 3D games. I used a utility called "FurMark" which uses Open GL to draw a large rotating fur coloured ring. Yes that's wierd but it does a good job at exercising the PC + graphics card and it also tests the Open GL drivers at least in a limited way. I suggest anyone having stability problems first proves that their PC is stable by running this for 1+ hours. If the PC doesn't survive this test without crashing then you can rule out SL and you have a repeatable test to diagnose issues. (I know - 1+ hours away from SL. But remember, you have to sleep, the computer doesn't. When 175.16 drivers were first released the English version appeared to install but didn't actually update the driver. You can check by openning the NVIDIA control panel and clicking "System Information" in the bottom left corner. Solution is to re-download the driver and reinstall. (They appear to have replaced the English version with a corrected International version.) Diagnosing an unstable system is a nightmare because you have to keep swapping components until the problem goes away. I bought a 800W power supply for £25 on Ebay which I guess was relatively cheap. (I don't want to think about how many Lindon Dolars or I might change my mind.) And for anyone still having problems - hope they are fixed soon. With no updates to my system I find things more stable, I crash out of SL with the error mentioned about from time to time, but it doesn't seem to be causing that catastrophic (for working) crash out of windows to a blue screen that I repeatedly post about.....
there is no other application that errors or crashed on my rather new machine. so.... 2 days without a windows crash made me write that post.... then I re-enabled voice and crashed to a blue screen 2 times in 5 minutes....
anyone else tried the voice possibilities or is it another coincidence? voice off = only the crash indicated above, two days, again, without a crash to a blue screen.... Nvidia drivers don't test good/bad consistently with any version...
I wouldn't have ever come to the JIRA with crashed as seldom as I have without voice turned on... do I need to start a new issue? Jeaniesing –
I think a new issue "Enabling Voice causes Vista nvidia driver instability" or something like that is appropriate. If there is a connection with the Voice application it may help us find it (Voice runs as a separate process from Second Life, you may have noticed that you can sometimes still talk on Voice even when you've been disconnected from the sim). I say "if" because none of the devs are any closer to understanding what is really going on with these crashes. It's possible that Voice isn't really the problem, but that when you enable voice, it also enables some graphics widget (like the voice combo box) and something in that code freaks out the nvidia driver. My assessment of this whole issue is that there are several problems at work, and that the best strategy is to try to separate them. Please "relate" your new issue to this one so that I'm aware of it and can watch it. Given the previous comments about Voice, I wanted to share my experiences with this kind of crash. Usually, when I'm about to crash, I have fair warning because all sound (music stream, ambient sounds) start chattering or skipping with a brief freeze of the UI with each skip. If I am able to minimize the viewer for a bit, many times it'll go away and I will not crash. If I persist and leave the viewer up, I get the crash exactly as described in this Jira, the screen blanks, I get the message about the driver recovering and the viewer is black (I believe the sound is still working at this point, but I'm unsure). If I don't close the viewer, it will eventually crash, but I seldom wait that long.
I know that a video crash being related to sound isn't very logical, but those are the symptoms that I see. I also should mention that this is on a very new HP laptop running Vista-64 with the OEM video drivers, so I'm behind a bit on the driver until they update. I also tend to suspect this is also related to No one at LL has made any progress on determining what is happening with these crashes. We still cannot duplicate them with similar systems. I myself have a Windows Vista box with an nvidia card, and don't experience the crashes. Let me enumerate the possibilities:
Now for the roundup of frequent posters on this JIRA: LithiumIon: Used "FurMark" to stress test his graphics system. Found if failed just as this issue with SL. Self-diagnosed a power supply instability. Replaced power supply and crashing stopped. Cheladie: Update to nvidia drivers 175.12 resolved the crashes Toysoldier: Has OEM box and cannot use updated drivers. Found some relief by disabling atomopheric shaders. Suggestions: try disabling Voice as per Jeaniesing. Or try to see if it is hardware related by using FurMark to stress the graphics system. Absolute: Update to nvidia drivers 175.12 resolved the crashes Wolf: The reporter of this issue. Wolf – are you still having this issue? Have you tried updating your driver? The third item:
"* This is a problem with Windows Vista and the way it actively (perhaps annoyingly) monitors the video driver. There's something about the way Vista interprets the nvidia driver running sl that trips some alarm that eventually crashes the system. " is a second life problem. Others had it and fixed their software last year as part of their Vista compatibility. The ball is in your court. I don't think Vista compatibility is optional for Second Life. On item 2: "* There are bugs in the nvidia video drivers, particularly the older OEM versions. These bugs are triggered by something new in recent SL code (the 1.20 viewer branch)." Nvidia software releases are ridiculous. ATI makes a new production release monthly. Nvidia does 'beta' releases every 6-8 weeks, and a production release it seems twice a year. The result is many software defects staying for a while. However, none of those defects are material to Second Life. What is material is the Vista incompatibility. Worse, it appears to be a poor program design issue. It needs to be fixed. If some audio drivers are causing the same failure (I am not failure with the specifics on that) it is possibly a related problem (if the audio and video server interfaces are in the same modules or otherwise linked serially).. continuation.... I got the newest RC and crashed to blue screen twice..... without voice on....
But, thank you for not leaving me alone to comment in this thread I'll go looking for furmark tonight.... to see how the HP/Nvidia holds up to it Sougent, I also have a very new HP and the 8600M video card.... I said, in a thread that preceded this one,. that the greatest source of anger for me is that I checked and rechecked SL's recommendations before buying this machine since my work in SL bought it for me, and I have barely been able to work in SL since. and crashed again.. can I have the last RC back, please?
Changing to an ATI card will fix that problem...it has been tempting...although ATI is way behind the performance curve now...or maybe SL should put their developers on Vista...
HP will be glad to know that I just ran 7 hours of furmark.... they built a very stable system
SO I cannot have the last RC back... I didn't figure Last evening I watched a friend who has the same graphics card (albeit in a Dell rather than an HP) crash as often as I did.... It has been a while since i have posted. I wanted to say that since the past couple RC releases, the frequency of the NVIDIA driver crashes has become significant again - to the point of frustrating. There is a new club that I just finished building on the GRID and the center of this club seems to be a real sore spot as I crash all the time in this spot.
I have submitted my CRASH logs almost every time but I am not sure anyone at LL is even looking at all my crash logs. I thought with all the added thread tracing that that has been added in the past 3 releases that it should provide the developers with more answers. I know there seemed to be fingers pointing to the older or OEMed NVIDIA drivers but why only SECOND LIFE? Why only on the RC versions? Come on guys...I am sorry but I am getting real frustrated there afer months of working on this issue and tons of logs submitted to LL development and after all the diagnostic JIRA comments being fed in - that this cannot be isolated and fixed. This week I submitted a formal problem ticket with HP asking them to update they March/08 NVIDIA driver to the more recent version released by NVIDIA. I also escalated the probelem through HP's email to CEO comments to ask why HP's OEM drivers takes so many months behind the manufacturer's release of drivers. BUT... I still am pretty convinced this is a bug with LL's code not properly written - and I agree with the predictions that the SecondLife viewers not being Vista Compatible. I will try disabling the VOICE CHAT to see if the problem goes away. I hope you didnt mean disabling the AUDIO all together. One of the #1 reasons for me being in SL is to be involved in the club scenes (hell - I build them and have run one). I cant have an SL with no Audio stream. Yours very frustrated... Toy Not the whole audio stream, Toy
... at least with the last RC version (10).... i downloaded the newest version and began crashing left and right without voice enabled. I am a music teacher in RL and would be saddened without my fix of SL live music.
I have already submitted to HP twice, without even a response... I also put a note into the Nvidia people telling them that HP was giving them a bad name by not updating drivers... What were the changes in RC 11 that I have gone from crashing only out of SL (acceptable if it isn't too frequent, and it wasn't) to crashing out of Vista (unacceptable as I lose work in 3rd party programs)?? If my hypothesis is correct-
So from the comments it seems that rc 11 is much less stable than rc 10, at least for those of you suffering from the nvidia problem.
Apart from bug fixes, the diff between 10 and 11 is trivial except for one thing: the watchdog was turned back on. The watchdog was introduced a few revs back, and gave us some useful data on a variety of thread related issues. It was turned off for rc10 because we had gleaned what we could from it. Apparently was inadvertantly turned back on for rc11. I'm currently requesting more info about this from the dev team, and also asking if there is a manual way to turn it off. I'll let you know what I find... Toysoldier – I will try to pull up your crashes and see if there is anything I can pass on to the devs. I'll let you all know what I find out with crash reports and the watchdog. Jeaniesing – secret trick to disable the watchdog. Add the following option to the command line arguments in the SL shortcut: -set WatchdogEnabled 0
Please let me know if disabling the watchdog (and Voice) restores rc 11 to stability for you. "C:\Program Files (x86)\SecondLifeReleaseCandidate\SecondLifeReleaseCandidate.exe" --settings settings_releasecandidate.xml --channel "Second Life Release Candidate"-set WatchdogEnabled 0 ..... is the current shortcut, except that "Error: too many positional options" pops up and doesn;t allow me to start SL.... can you ask the team which I should keep?
grrr... and I keep forgetting to say... I send crash reports EVERY time... and would love a quick lesson on how to attach logs here, if they are any help to anyone
Jeaniesing – I will try to disable the watchdog myself this evening and see if I get that error. Likely the arguments need a certain order, so I'll try moving the one to disable the watchdog. Also possible is that it needs another dash --set. Anyhow I'll check this out.
I found one crash of yours in the crash database. This means most of your crashes aren't getting through to us. The one crash i have has the log attached. I'll investigate this too... Jeaniesing, these are the help pages for JIRA https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Issue_tracker
 & https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Debug_Help
Towards the end of the Debug Help page is a section "Attaching the screenshot to an issue" Please note in Vista the logs are C:\Users[YOUR USERNAME]\AppData\Roaming\SecondLife\logs You may need to Show hidden files to see them Knowledge Base > Second Life Info > Solution Finder > Technical Issue > Where do I find my Second Life diagnostic logs? Topic #: 4051-4209 Thank you Periapse and Ellla.... I am attaching what seems pertinent from my crash this morning at 6:56SLT... the crash report sent, by everything I can see. Can you advise me on how to make them send more often?
also.... email notifications from the aren't working for me... I'm just a bundle of fun, eh? Jeaniesing, JIRA email notifications, me neither
 I have started an issue Let's look at what we know:
1) the problem is Vista detecting a driver timeout 2) the problem doesn't affect some users 3) some users have it consistently 4) some users have it intermittently, but in clusters. For example, when I have it, I may have it EVERY 1-5 minutes after logging on (after 5 or so tries I give up and go elsewhere). Or I may have an hour or longer and never have it. 5) it doesn't occur on Linden QA cycles First, while it is timing related it doesn't appear to be a timing issue controlled by the client PC. So watchdog on and off may be a performance issue, but shouldn't affect this. Second, the problem IS in the client software, which not cause Vista to determine there is a driver timeout no matter what happens Third, it is an issue with the way Nvidia did their driver, since it should have protected itself from applications. It didn't. But since they are the performance leaders, no choice here Fourth, it may be a factor of network or server issues. If it NEVER occurs to Linden people running Vista, it may be primarily network related. Fifth, from either code inspection or a slow or variable network simulation environment (the problem may not be speed, but a few second block in network traffic) Linden QA or development needs to recreate the problem. Both to add it to future test cases and to diagnose it. Sixth, switching to an ATI card. 3850s are available for under $110, and 4850s under $200. The first should be more than adequate in most SL uses. The second is comparable to the better single GPU Nvidia cards (9800GTX, etc.). Jeaniesing – Apparently we discovered a bug with the command line options. Mani Linden is fixing it for the next RC. You can turn off the watchdog from within second life. Log in, and then go to the Advanced menu and select Debug Settings. In the box start typing WatchdogEnabled until it finds the setting. Select "False" and exit. The viewer should remember this setting, so even on subsequent runs the dog will be silent.
This is what I have for your system: This is an HP laptop, right? What specific make, and how much RAM and video RAM? I'm going to ask our QA dept if they could buy one of these specific laptops, with an identical configuration, and see what they can discover. If you could spec your machine out for us that would be great. You know, I haven't had this happen to me recently, the only difference other than the RC is that I turned ImagePipelineUseHTTP to true......though the sound skipped once last night as if it were going to crash. Haven't had a total machine lockup with recent RC's.
That said, it's not been a case of crashing consistently each time I log in for a while, though usually at least once during a 3-4 hour session. I think I have a similar laptop as Jeaniesing, it's an HP Pavilion Entertainment PC DV9700, 4gb memory and Vista 64 (and I'd assume 64 bit Nvidia drivers too). Here's some info on the video, it it might be useful. Also, if there are any debugging utilities I can install or options I can activate, I'd be happy to do so and run until I crash. NVIDIA System Information report created on: 06/27/2008 11:31:00 [Display] [Components] nvCplUIR.dll 1.5.700.24 NVIDIA Control Panel Sougent guy has great taste in laptops.... that is EXACTLY my machine
 ....
Watchdog is disabled and I will post results of any further crashes here Thank you for your kind attentions.... Bluescreen crash at 1259SLT :'(.... logs posted above
jeaniesing, just for yucks go into debug settings and set the ImagePipelineUseHTTP to true, see if you still crash out.
Bluescreen crash 1:38SLT
Hi..... new Dell XPS M1530 thus:
CPU: Intel Pentium III/Pentium III Xeon (0.25 micron process) with external L2 cache (2094 MHz) nVIDIA Driver Version: 7.15.11.7431 22/02/2008 and experiencing this issue without any discernable pattern.... crashes very quickly or could survive a good while. Complexity of textures may be a common factor. common threads are not texture complexity. it works or crashes in the same environment. it works or crashes on fast pcs and slow laptops.. Three common aspects: Vista, Nvidia video cards, and a timeout causes the crash. It is a timing problem...not pc dependent. Further, it is a problem many games had in 2007 that they have since corrected. It may be server dependent, only a small percentage of users post problems. More likely, communications line dependent. But underlying it, a problem with the client software.
I've crashed a small handful of times today, should I continue to post crash logs, or do you have enough to go on? Thank you
jeaniesing – thx. I'll let you know if any devs want to see more crashes. They haven't pulled anything useful out of any of these yet.
Ok, just crashed hard, blew out the video driver, crashed SL then completely locked up my laptop requiring hard reboot.
Was hovering over some land for sale in Obersdorf, I believe it was, and had switched away to Firefox to check some plurks, then switched back to SL and clicked the little $ icon to bring up the sale dialog to check out the particulars of the sale, the screen immediately started flickering in waves is best I can describe it, did that for several seconds then all went blank, it recovered with the usual driver recovery message, SL crashed and started sending the info, I switched to firefox and went into gmail to click on an email containing the link to this jira entry, clicked on the link to bring up the new tab with jira in it and the cursor froze with the little Vista busy circle. Tried to get it to shut down using a press of the power button, but no joy, had to hold the sucker down until it powered off. Will save the contents of the logs directory if you want it let me know. Not sure if anything got through during the automatic process since it froze in the middle of that. OK... just an update...
I have tried turning off my voice and I have disabled the watchdog, and the video driver timeout crashes have not gotten any better. Since RC10, the crashes have become far worse then they were in about 7 8 9 when the crashes were actually very few. In fact they are so common now that I have relied upon version 19 most of the time now for new SL activities after I crash once on the RC each day. A club I just built in SL 3 weeks ago seems to be a constant source of generating RC crashes. In fact I know the approxiamte spot in the club that seems to trigger me to crash within a short period of time after i stay in that area. The club is "mortuary / six feet under" and i need to stand on the or in the gave plot along the middle section of the right hand side of the grave (when entering the cemetary). The ppl I know at the club already know well enough if I disappear while there - its because of this video driver crash. I dont know if i mentioned it but I am using and HP Pavilion DV6568SE with Vista Home Premium SP1 and all the latest drivers (including the latest March release of the OEM of the NVIDIA driver). PS... I have not heard from HP regarding when they plan to release an updated NVIDIA OEM driver. As a builder - I am actually starting to like a couple of the new features in the new RC client so I would prefer to use the RC vs. the version 19 client. But the video driver crashes become annoying. If there is anything else you all want me to try - just give me a shout.... Toysoldier I found the following interesting reading on the issue
http://forums.nvidia.com/lofiversion/index.php?t35609.html
I have a Vista 64 / 8800 GS rackmount setup that reset after 5-15 minutes in SL. I have since opened the case, and using nTune set the fan to 100% (when you got 4 other computers in the rack the sound really doesn't matter) . It's been running for over 12 hours at max res now and doesn't get past 55 C . So for me cooling seemed to be a fix. I suspect that replacing the PSU with a larger unit you are also replacing the PSU fan with a higher volume one may have something to do with it. Another person on the thread listed pointed out that the 8800 can be dumping 70-90C output air into the case as input to cool other motherboard components that may be unhappy if that is their starting point. While the card is supposed to be happy at 100+ C , is your bus controller? Why would Vista 64 have problems? Maybe it interferes with proper fan control access. p.s. Of course to get that 100% fan in nTune I may have turned off more than factory recommended. The next project is to turn them back on and keep the cooling, along with an aftermaket cooler... Cooling is a nice theory........ but SL will crash when I have just fired up my puter 5 minutes before logging in. I honestly tried keeping the laptop case cooler before I realized that it was not the root of the problem... you have to test every theory though
Ok, after a space of a week or so of not crashing, crashed twice in the last week. The most recent one required me to power off my laptop, the screen was dark and the music from SL was still going but was very choppy which is it's usual behavior with me. I saved the logs, and they did appear to upload when I signed back on.
Some observations. Seems like almost every time I'm getting this, it's when I am trying to camera around either with flycam or the regular camera movements. Occasionally, the SL viewer screen will flash and display a picture that is a scene of where I had been previously, apparently something from a buffer or from a stray portion of video memory that's getting redisplayed from the viewer. This sometimes happens without a crash and corrects itself, either that or the viewer crashes, I've had both. I've also seen it during the process of the driver crash and recovery. I'm not a C++ programmer, but this seems like you're getting into video memory areas that you shouldn't be. I've also noticed that CPU (on both of them) spikes when the crash indicators start such as the skipping sound and video flickering. Seems like a crash is more likely for me if I've got other stuff going on in the background like Firefox with multiple tabs open, so that more memory/CPU is being used by other processes. Noticed the following in the tail end of the log after the crash, apparently it'd been throttling back quite a bit just before the crash. FYI, my bandwidth is set to 150kbps in preferences. 2008-07-04T02:59:17Z INFO: display_stats: FPS: 10.82 I don't know if any of this helps, wish there were a solid repro but you might try loading down your test machines a little with other stuff running then stay in-world a bit and do some camming around with parcel music going and so forth. for some reason, I don't know why, I'm not getting this problem anymore. I used to be getting it, but I'm not getting it for a few RC versions. Never got it with RC 10 on forward.
I haven't changed anything, haven't upgraded my drivers (I can't upgrade to newest NVIDIA drivers anyway, my computer doesn't install the latest NVIDIA drivers properly - black screen Vista issue which remains unresolved for me with the newer drivers. my NVIDIA driver is 163.75, running a 8600 GTS, on Vista 64) For those of you who are running your nVidia/Vista combo on a laptop, I have some disturbing news:
I mention this not in any way to exonerate the SL code, or to dismiss any of these reported problems. My purpose is to alert you in case you want to pursue anything with your OEM, especially regarding driver updates (like the one to force the fan). I imagine that some percentage of those suffering from this nvidia issue are hit by thermal/power problems (as LithiumIon, above, discovered). I'll continue to forward any info I obtain from our QA and developers. Periapse,
Although I agree that for some individuals, this recent NVIDIA thermal problem could be the source of the problem - specially since running the SL viewer puts huge heat generating stresses on the GPU (I can clearly notice it on my HP DV6568SE laptop whereby the system fan turns on immediately when SL starts and the underbelly and case get pretty damn hot), this HW problem you point out doesnt make complete sense since previous non-RC code also stresses out the GPU and I dont get these Video Driver application crashes... it only happens on the RC code. That still seems to point the source of the root problem toward app code and maybe an outdated driver prob combo. PS... my system does not crash - just the SL application. I can simply double click the SL app and I am back in. and so we wait. Toy the buck continues to be passed
HP says, "Jeanie, I would like to inform you that currently the NVIDIA graphics cards which are shipped with the HP notebooks have no issues. The BSOD error occur when there is corrupt software programs or due to incompatibility of the game." wanna say last 2 days not any freeze or crasch for me
i hope it helps to tackle the probleme. I'm crashing every 2-3 minutes too, and tried any possible thing, i even changed video card, but without any outcome. but i noticed a strange behavior of SL process that i posted in
I've been having this same issue for several weeks as well. I seldom can even get into Second Life (except on Friday evenings for a couple of hours - go figure!). I crash as soon as Second Life loads and my avatar appears.
System: Second Life 1.19.1 (4) I have tried installing several of the drivers mentioned by people having this problem, but still no luck. I've tried drivers 174.93, 177.66, and 7.15.11.7432 A. I have sent an e-mail off to HP with a link to this blog and a link to the article about NVIDIA financial hit due to their faulty graphic cards. This is rather embarrassing because I'm trying to convince an academic library consortium to use Second Life for meetings, and I can't even log on! I had the exact same problem:
Currently random crashes, often it was a particular place that triggered it, like Eshis Flower Tower at Desperado: Screen turns black CPU: Intel Core 2 Series Processor (2393 MHz) I tryed out all sorts of settings, I crashed even at all settings minimized, antialiasing disabled etc. But, then I turned of 'Enable Open Vertex Buffer Objects' and I havent crashed since. I have everyting maxed out, and went to Eshis Flower with 55 people on the sim, and all went perfect. :/ I have a correction to my post above... I am still chrashing... grrrrr even with that buffer turned off.
The issue still persists..... BSOD's as well...
heat is not the problem, I turned on my machine after being away a week, sitting nearly in front of an AC vent, SL was on for 3 minutes and kaboom.... I have the exact same problem, v1.19 was fine never could get RC 1.20 to work cos of these nvidia driver crashes. Now that i had to upgrade main viewer I can't play SL until this problem is fixed .... is there anyway to d/l v1.19 again? I can't even find it on bittorrent.
Asus G1Sn
Second Life 1.20.15 (92456) Jul 18 2008 10:58:42 (Second Life Release)
CPU: Intel Pentium 4 Northwood (3391 MHz) Memory: 2047 MB OS Version: Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3 (Build 2600) Graphics Card: GeForce 8800 GTS 512/PCI/SSE2 GeForce Driver 175.19 (very latest one) SL viewer crashed and started the crash reporter, but the whole computer froze up and I had to CTR-ALT-DEL out of theSL viewer Later Edit :..... Turning of voice didnt do the trick. I crashed today with voice turned off.
Second Life 1.20.15 (92456) Jul 18 2008 10:58:42 (Second Life Release) CPU: Intel Core 2 Series Processor (2393 MHz) Toy giving another update on this long standing problem...
The latest release has done nothing to fix the problem. It still video driver crashes about 2 or 3 times a night for inexplicable reasons as well as has many times where the screen freezes for 1 to 5 seconds but thankfully just recovers without crashing. I have tried all the different scenarios and nothing seems to make it better or worse. As such I have put all my shading back on so that I can at least enjoy the view of SL while I have not crashed. As I reported last month - I did open a ticket with HP reporting that their NVIDIA driver they currently have released is outdated and needs to be upgraded to possibly correct my SL problem... I am very confident that my time and effort to report this problem to HP was about 1/2 of my life that I wont ever get back. They simply dont care. But... I still hold out that since the crashes dont happen in version 19 and they do in all the RC 20 releases... this is still a problem that LL developed triggered and should have a way to back out until the NVIDIA drivers are properly updated by all the slowwwww moving laptop OEMs! I havent heard from Periapse or anyone else from LL lately regarding this problem. Have they come to the conclusion that the problem is an NVIDIA OEM driver problem and not LL's anymore? Has it been 100% confirmed that the latest generic release of the NVIDIA driver (which obviously the owners of laptops cannot use) has corrected the problem? Toysoldier Thor Toy –
Nothing has been confirmed 100%. I think it's clear that there are several crash modalities at work here. The major issue at play is that some code change we (LL) made between 1.19 and 1.20 interacts poorly with some old nvidia drivers under windows vista. Mysteriously, ATI cards don't exhibit this problem with either 1.19 or 1.20. Upgrading to the appropriate driver has resolved most issues. For a very small minority, however, even the driver upgrade isn't enough. The only data we have on that is one account where purchasing a new power supply fixed the problem. High end nvidia cards burn a lot of power, and generate a lot of heat. We have several repros for nvidia crashes in MacBookPros because of heat issues, but so far still no repros from vista, so I cannot say that heat/power issues are the only other problem besides the driver interaction. 00trader00, and others still stuck with this issue: 1.20 is not a mandatory update. Please continue to use 1.19.4. If you have already dowloaded 1.20, you can re-download 1.19.4 from here: One of the triggers for me has been using the Space Navigator in skycam mode, but there seems to be another element that I'm missing because it's not consistent, sometimes I can skycam around fine and sometimes it's only seconds before the screen starts flickering, the sound stuttering and I end up with a driver crash/recovery (if I'm lucky) or a lock up.
Lately, I've been seeing a variation that I never used to see. I get screen flickering/stuttering along with sound stuttering, both CPU's are maxed, but the driver doesn't crash and though the computer is effectively locked up, the sound stuttering remains (even though I tend to lose the screen eventually) and in the case of the streaming music, it appears to continue to stream though I'm not sure because I don't let this go on for long for fear of damaging my speakers. I have attempted to get it to log off by pressing the power button to trigger a shutdown but that doesn't work so it's essentially locked up. Periapse.... HP will not listen to us... is there nothing LL can do to show them that an upgrade of drivers may help? I know of one gal who forced a driver update from the Nvidia/laptops to go sites and her problems ceased, I know of a friend on a Dell who got his driver update (from Dell) and the problem stopped.... I have linked tech support to this page and they give me a bunch of BS to do that has nothing to do with the problem....
Howdy, following this thread, I have the same issue...
GF7050VT-M Motherboard Core 2 Intel 2.5 ghz each core. 2 gig memory at 800 nVidia 8600GT with 1 gig ram Vista SL crashes within 5 minutes usually with Page Fault Blue screen, sometimes just dumps me back to vista, sometimes reboots the computer, sometimes freezes. Ive tried installing lots of Nvidia drivers even up to the 177.xx ones on Guru3D. I commend Periapse on all the work that has been done on this. I think that maybe a summit with Linden Labs, Nvidia people and MS Vista people is needed to track this one down. Get them all talking so effective drivers can be written...or a solution found. how about this???...a meeting in SL with LL(Periapse and techbuds), Nvidia and MS people in a room with all the ppl who wish to come who are experiencing this problem. Then when we crash and log back in we can discuss what happened and share error msgs and crash logs etc. It might be entertaining to see avies popping on and off and back on again like popcorn and give these engineers some grist for their mills. LOL jeaniesing –
I just emailed Zen Linden. He recently had some luck lobbying Dell to update their driver (though it took months before Dell did anything). I'm hoping he'll have some advice on how to deal with HP. This bug is stupid, i can play crysis on high, but cant run second life? display driver has stopped responding I hate that so much. I have a good computer why does such a simple game crash? please fix the problem.
Stats: Gateway FX4710 I've been having the same video driver crashes noted here with every release in the 1.20 series and the release version - so came hunting and found this report. Very useful, and reporting back that having upgraded my drivers to 175.16 (for Vista) as suggested by some above, the crashes have disappeared, at least in 6 hours online tonight - and they were predictably regular before.
I did have OEM drivers and some have suggested that if you have a mean laptop maker like Dell (like I do), they won't let you upgrade to Nvidia's latest drivers... true, but not unfixable. I downloaded my 175.16 driver from laptopvideo2go.com, and installed it with their modded INF file there and it seems to work fine. For that release see: http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?s=a4fee73e3a631c0069982fd620d44ed7&showtopic=18548 As those drivers are unsupported, please note I'm not saying they won't eat your laptop - risk is yours - but it didn't eat mine. Hope this helps someone! @Moxy: "I have noticed the CPU is at 100% when the crashes occur"
I have been following this thread, because I get a similar crash resulting in a C++ Runtime Error (VWR-2095) and then a black login screen ( The comments about the CPU 100% and also someone's comment on the 1.20 release Blog (LL official blog) about high RAM usage (also see
I managed to run for about an hour last night (stopped cos it was bed time!) without crashing by doing the workarounds mentioned above - minimising SL window if RAM use went high; changing focus to Task Manager if CPU usage went high. Obviously this is not a good solution - having the Task Manager open covers up a good chunk of my SL window - but at least it helped me to get some building done. I offer it as a possible help for some of the people who are still bothered by this issue, and as a potential pointer for LL Developers in case the memory issues are related to the Nvidia crash. System specs: 2nd Life Version: 1.20 (RC all versions and main viewer) - Nicholaz (all editions) - 1.19 - right back to 1.18.3.5 Ok I took Honey Fairweather's advice and got the latest drivers from this website:
http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/forum/index.php?showforum=94 I have a Asus G1 laptop with NVidia 9500M GS graphphics and Vista 64 Bit so got the 177.79 version of that, subbed in the modded INF file, uninstalled whatever nvidia stuff i had already using add/remove programs and then installed this. Basically seems to be working, i'm using the RC software now and most all is good. Only weired think is that some times logging in I'm getting 5 fps but most others around 25fps. I think the 5fps lag tho is some normal crap issues with SL as my friends are also complaining about that at times today. Very happy to have this reasonably work'ed around...if ur a woman Honey look me up maybe hook up for a thankyou yiff Vista x64 home / nVidia 8800GS /177.66 drivers
After 5 minutes the cursor becomes corrupt and within 30 sec black screen. Reset required. Summary: using any combination of all the avaiable viewer/driver combinations, after 5-10 minutes I can't see a thing. Is this problem across all nVidia card drivers? I would like to use some version to do CUDA developement, and it would be nice to see inside SL, and do so on the same machine. Driver crashed again but after making numerous system changes..... I had low FPS with 177.79 from laptopideo2go but i found that my laptop did not have vista sp1 so I installed that today and also re-installed 177.79 that that point i was getting nearly 30fps!
I cranked up all graphics to ultra, max custom everything on and was getting 25fps, turned on anisotropic also and then crashed at store http://slurl.com/secondlife/Cristat/38/233/35 This issue is occuring for me as well
Vista Home Premium SP1 w/ all recommended updates Try the NGO Optimized Nvidia Driver.
I have been using 1.20 for a long time now starting with the first RC version... I have never had a problem with my Nvidia 7800GT with the NGO drivers. http://www.ngohq.com/home.php?page=nvidia http://www.ngohq.com/home.php?page=nvidia2 For me the NGO Optimized drivers have always worked better in SL than the official versions. Yep seems to be doing good now with latest drivers.
Keeping Anisotropic filtering off went hours w/o any crash or lag. Hasn't been that good ever i would say. So looks like desktop people need latest at: And laptop people: Might be good idea to render links to this page on prims at our places in SL with soo many people telling me they are crashing all the time due to driver issues. Ticket closed for me. Unfortunately a driver update doesn't seem to be an option for Linux, so I'd be loathe to see this closed. I'm having the same problem on both Linux and Vista (different symptoms as noted above by others - video driver crashes on Vista, jerkiness and unusable slowdown on Linux). I have had to revert to the 1.19.4 release client.
Configuration: Anyone had any success in resolving this under Linux? ....Any luck with HP? I have tried to load the laptop to go drivers, and when you go for the final restart the HP system loads its driver back in. I'm certain it cam be circumvented, but not quite willing to spend the hours at something that 'might' help
Same issue here, crashes within 60 seconds when setting everything to Ultra. Crashes less when setting it to Low.
Second Life 1.20.15 (92456) Jul 18 2008 10:58:42 (Second Life Release) Ok, I took a chance and used the laptop2go site to upgrade the drivers on my HP Laptop to 177.79.
I haven't gotten the same kind of crash as before (with the caveat that I've not been in SL a lot lately) but I'm still crashing. Haven't had the entire laptop lock up and the driver crash and recover, but I have several times had the SL viewer go black (and white for that matter) and the viewer freeze and crash with the same symptoms as before for that aspect of this crash. So far I'd have to say the updated drivers may be helping to prevent the entire system from freezing requiring a power off and the issue with the driver crashing and recovering, but they don't appear to fully prevent the issue. Updated drivers aren't the fix for this issue. Well I seemed to have resolved my problems.
I replaced my 8600 with another 8600 replaced my mobo and memory, replaced the processor and the power supply. (took the whole thing back to Frys...they wanted $70 to tell me which component was failing...so i just said replace each goram component!Unable to render embedded object: File ((all were still under warranty within 30 days of purchase btw) (thank you Jason at Fry's) not found.) I opened my case and put a 8" fan on the whole thing. which sux cause I was using the fan to cool me! LOL I loaded whql drivers 175.19 for the Nvidia >>Sougent Harrop - 10/Aug/08 07:17 PM
>>Ok, I took a chance and used the laptop2go site to upgrade the drivers on my HP Laptop to 177.79. >>I haven't gotten the same kind of crash as before (with the caveat that I've not been in SL a lot lately) but I'm still crashing. Haven't had the entire laptop lock up and the driver crash and recover, but I have several times had the SL viewer go black (and white for that matter) and the viewer freeze and crash with the same symptoms as before for that aspect of this crash. Sougent....i've been stable for quite some time now on 177.79 on my 9500M GS laptop....for me it was really critical to completly rid the system of all NVidia drivers completely first. If you can go back and use the uninstallers to strip off what you can then reboot. Then use DriveSweeper to rid urself of all software Nvidia http://www.guru3d.com/category/driversweeper/ At that point I ran the 177.79 installer..(make sure you have the properly modded INF)....also I further modded the INF so that the stupid card doesn't go into slowdown mode when on batteries. Apparently these NVidia cards have 3 power modes ...get the wrong mode and ur at 5fps or less.... change Powermizer settings in INF to: ;Powermizer settings this way you get full speed all the time but power savings can still turn the card down...remember to run in maximum performance mode with your power settings I'd be very curious to learn if this works for you and if I am just lucky or this new driver really solves the issue... BTW I see Nvidia upto 177.83 but i'm not changing till the Lindens mess it all up again. Second Life 1.20.15 (92456) Jul 18 2008 10:58:42 (Second Life Release)
You are at 192317.7, 231455.5, 401.4 in Pacific Vineyards located at sim2804.agni.lindenlab.com (216.82.19.47:12035) CPU: Intel Core 2 Series Processor (2194 MHz) Within 30 minutes of the 1.20 upgrade I started crashing... same symptoms as described in the root case. Any time I logged back in, and was in the presence of another avatar, I'd crash withing 30 seconds to a minute. When logged in alone, not in proximity to other av's, I was seemingly stable, tho the "near other av's matter may be coincidence". I've since updated my driver to the NGO nVidia ForceWare 177.83 driver for Windows Vista 32. Though my crash rate is not as sever as preciously noted (i.e. I've been up for as long as 30 minutes w/o crash), the problem persists with the same symptoms. Anxious for a true solution as my 3DConnexion Space Navigator Controller is a rather expensive paperweight atm. Found this little tidbit on the Nvidia forums, describes the problem exactly.
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=31913 I'd followed the advice given and uninstalled my existing drivers and installed the most current drivers from laptop2go which minimized my issues, possibly resolved them as I hadn't crashed for a while, however I ran into an issue which has caused me to back out the drivers to the current OEM drivers. With the newer drivers, I couldn't play blueray disks in my quite pricey blueray disk drive in my laptop, got an error and so far haven't found a resolution for that. Upon going back the older drivers, the symptoms reoccur, so I can vouch for the fact that the newer drivers do help. However, to expect any but the bravest and most tech savvy individuals to do this would seem to me to be unreasonable. There ought to be something that can be done on the viewer side to mitigate this issue. There are several references to Dell and even the M1530 on this page, but I don't want to risk piecing together the advice as a Mac guy somewhat ignorant about drivers (and will return to being a Mac guy after this, thank you) . I wonder ... does anyone have a good summary of what the best advice is for someone running SL on a Dell with these constant crashes?
Comment from
Brand Galindo - 07/Sep/08 07:42 AM I have been to countless other forums, discussions, press releases, etc. that are dedicated to this exact problem. I have spent hours upon hours reading through volumes of reports that have been issued to describe the problem, some that claim to partially alleviate the symptoms and others that supposedly point to more help on the topic. I have had absolutely NO results from any of the suggested actions to do so much as even reduce the frequency of the issue by a tiny fraction. Here is what I have done so far that has been suggested elsewhere: 1. Turn off atmospheric shaders in the graphics preferences. 2. Deactivate the voice chat feature completely. 3. Set the Watchdog feature in the debug console to False. 4. Provide extra cooling (without overclocking) to the video card. 5. Update the video drivers to the latest OPEN GL drivers (which are newer than the latest OEM drivers). 6. Update to the latest SL viewer (I have tried, both, the latest release viewer and the latest RC viewer). **None of these have worked for me in the slightest!!!!** I am not here to rant, though. I can't expect to have full support - after all, I am running Vista 64 and my video card is an nVIDIA 8500 GTX - both of which are not on the "approved" list from Linden Labs. If I find a resolution for this problem it will likely be incidental to someone else's that falls within the range of support. My question to (hopefully) further this along is... Since the timeout is happening on the video driver end of the chain, is there no way to possibly configure something in the video card's feature set to avoid this issue? Since I have been trying to avoid it from the SL client - to no avail - even by putting all of the settings at their minimum (how awful SL looks when that is done!) I would think that maybe there is some setting I could try to disable in my video card's performance menu to avoid this issue. I would relay all of my specs like I have seen others do - but I don't know how to do that yet - I am new to JIRA. I found this (oldish) statement from Nivida http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=65161
NVIDIA Statement on TDR Errors, Display driver nvlddmkm stopped... What is TDR? Windows Vista has a new feature called Timeout Detection and Recovery (TDR). TDR attempts to detect problematic situations and recover to a functional desktop dynamically. In prior operating systems these situations would have resulted in a system freeze and forced customers to reboot their PC. More information about this Vista feature can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/displ...dm_timeout.mspx Why does it happen? TDRs can occur for a variety of reasons, many of which are unrelated to the graphics card or graphics driver. Since Vista launched, NVIDIA has been working hard to address TDRs issues that are specific to the graphics driver. Last year, we set up the NVIDIA Vista Quality Assurance Site to record and address user issues: http://www.nvidia.com/object/vistaqualityassurance.html | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Bug
Resolved
Critical
Second Life Crashes the Nvidia driver
- and yes!
I am still getting the same symptoms that has been mentioned in this opening ticket. I am using an HP Pavilion Laptop running Vista and the NVidia driver set. Although this symptom has substantially reduced in frequency in V 1.20.5 vs the older RC's, it is still happening. I am thinking that the related freeze/nofreeze cycling that seems to preceed this crash is related to the fact that for laptop NVidia drivers, the integrated chipset controls video and network. Just a guess.
I am hoping this is the new ISSUE ID that Periapse Linden is now following.
If the LL teams wants me to try something... send me an IM or leave me a comment here and I will help as soon as I come check here for updates to this issue ( I do not get atuo email notifications so IMing me is the most effective).
Toy