Outerra forum
Anteworld - Outerra Game => Tech demo, support, updates => Topic started by: giucam on July 08, 2012, 09:16:25 am
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Sometimes, especially when i'm driving a vehicle, Outerra hangs, with the audio going into a loop, then the screen turns black for a few seconds and then a Windows popup comes out saying that the ATI driver stopped working and that it was restored. Outerra is then frozen: its window is black and the only thing i can do is to kill it with the task manager.
I have an ATI 4850 with latest (non beta) catalyst, on Windows 7 (32 bit).
Is there anything i should look at the next time it happens?
Giulio
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Latest non-beta catalyst = 12.4/12.4b? (Check in Information->Software tab in Catalyst Control Center)
And what version of Outerra are you running? Build 3100 or 3162?
I remember I was having that problem from time to time on Catalyst 12.2 and older builds of Outerra.
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Latest non-beta catalyst = 12.4/12.4b? (Check in Information->Software tab in Catalyst Control Center)
Yes, 12.4.
And what version of Outerra are you running? Build 3100 or 3162?
It happens on both 3100 and 3162.
Anyway i'm now going to install the 12.6 beta drivers. Let's hope it fixes the issue.
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It may be also caused by a third software (various utilities that display info over other apps windows), or by the card overheating.
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I think it is a 4XXX series issues. I still get that on my 4890.
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Nvidia ftw !! :D
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It may be a good idea to report the bug to AMD via http://www.ati.com/report (http://www.ati.com/report) form. There's not much we can do about it as it must be tested and encountered by the AMD team. Even though they are phasing out the support for 4xxx and older series, perhaps something will happen when they receive enough feedback from the users ...
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Nvidia ftw !! :D
Indeed. I've always liked their Nvidia Control Panel. ;D
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It happens also with the 14.6 beta.
Anyway, i opened a thread (http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=428&threadid=160295&enterthread=y) on the AMD forums. Let's hope they can help.
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I replied too. See if it gets noticed.
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I had sent a mail to AMD Customer Care (http://emailcustomercare.amd.com/) explaining the problem some days ago and i just received a lenghty mail from them with some things to do. I doubt these will help but I'll try nonetheless. At least they seem to care!
Zeos, you could try too.
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Last time I contacted them was months ago before they started helping willingly. Couldn't hurt.
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I had sent a mail to AMD Customer Care (http://emailcustomercare.amd.com/) explaining the problem some days ago and i just received a lenghty mail from them with some things to do. I doubt these will help but I'll try nonetheless. At least they seem to care!
As I thought those didn't help but today I received another mail asking for a report from dxdiag and another app. Also, the writer says he would like to see if they can verify the crash themselves.
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hmmm...
i received another mail today saying the best i can do is to provide feedback to you, cameni and angrypig, and, long story short, get you to work with AMD to fix the issue. :-*
It seems indeed that AMD didn't stop to support the <= HD 4000, but they just slowed down on those.
Please? :P
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They already have our software for testing, we have reported these crashes multiple times, but as long as it's about <= 4000 series they don't give any indication that they would be willing to fix it.
Can you fwd me the email? contact at outerra.com
I'll try to use it on them. A spell.
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Sent. :)
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Thanks. As I'm reading it - neither you nor they have brought up the issue of the discontinued support, right? Ok, I'll try to use our own channels now to inquire ;)
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That's right. I had no interest in reminding them about that and i guess they should know. (i hope...)
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A back door?! MWHAHAHA..
Right now I have no reason to upgrade my 4890 other then outerra. If I did an upgrade I would need to do a full PC upgrade just to get a 7000 series or higher to be at top performance.
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Well guys, got a reply from AMD saying that support for pre-5000 cards has been physically removed from their current sources. While there's a tiny possibility to backport fixes to the old branch, it may be too difficult and not worth the effort/gain.
On a related node, we are encountering random system freezes with 7850 card, but it may be also a faulty hw piece, needs more testing. Does somebody run OT currently with a 7000-series card?
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Funeral Dirge. Time to think about spending the monies.
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Funeral Dirge. Time to think about spending the monies.
That would be AMD's funeral dirge. They've done it to themselves with their stealth shills (check out AlienBabelTech if you don't believe me), over-optimizing their Never Settle drivers for sheer FPS at the expense of smooth frame rendering (see TweakTown's 7950 vs 660 Ti review), and not fixing Piledriver's L1 and L2 cache, resulting in improved single thread performance but same pathetic performance scaling with overclocking.
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On a related node, we are encountering random system freezes with 7850 card, but it may be also a faulty hw piece, needs more testing. Does somebody run OT currently with a 7000-series card?
Cameni, I'm still running a AMD 7970 in one of my other test machines. That machine currently has a fresh Windows 7 64 OS install on it with the latest Catalyst 12.11 Beta 11 drivers. Let me know if you'd like me to test anything in particular or with another driver.
Off the AMD subject I did have Outerra running without any issues (none that I could see anyway) on Windows 8 Pro 64 with the Nvidia 680 GTX and 310.70 drivers. The performance was as good if not better then what I experienced with Windows 7 64.
I don't know if it's already been discussed but I'd love to start testing on Linux.
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Dan, are you having any problems with that 7970 card? After some time running OT I'm getting system freezes that won't recover without restart. Many times it happened while I alt-tabbed away for a moment, but also when running OT in fullscreen.
But the card also won't sometimes wake up from the sleep properly, so it may be a bad hw.
We don't have a Linux build yet, planned for sometime next year if given the priority by our other projects. I just hope it won't become a nightmare to support because of Linux masters breaking the ABI constantly ...
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Dan, are you having any problems with that 7970 card? After some time running OT I'm getting system freezes that won't recover without restart. Many times it happened while I alt-tabbed away for a moment, but also when running OT in fullscreen.
But the card also won't sometimes wake up from the sleep properly, so it may be a bad hw.
Cameni, I've had various problems over the last year with the 7970 (some of which I commented here about). The last time I used the 7970 with Outerra it was with the 12.10 and 12.11 Beta 8 drivers and I did notice a performance jump but I did have graphics corruption similar to some of the screen shots I've seen here. I've also tested it on Windows XP/SP2 64-bit and Windows 7/SP1 64 but it didn't seem to matter other than the fact that the beta 12.11's were not available for Win XP.
As far as the sleep issue you mentioned, I haven't seen it with the 7970 but I do always set my power options in Windows to High Performance and turn hibernation off.
I will try Outerra with the 12.11 Beta 11's later today and let you know how it goes.
We don't have a Linux build yet, planned for sometime next year if given the priority by our other projects. I just hope it won't become a nightmare to support because of Linux masters breaking the ABI constantly …
I understand, with the direction MS Windows seems to be taking and some of the info I'm reading about Valve (Steam), Linux just might end up becoming the OS of choice for PC gaming. I'm very curious to see how well Outerra performs after seeing how well other OpenGL sims/games run on Linux.
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We don't have a Linux build yet, planned for sometime next year if given the priority by our other projects. I just hope it won't become a nightmare to support because of Linux masters breaking the ABI constantly ...
Actually, the ever-changing ABI is a myth. It is true that the kernel changes its internal ABI (so e.g. kernel modules like drivers need to be recompiled) but the userspace ABI doesn't change. Also the OpenGL ABI hasn't changed in a long (too long) time. There has been a proposal for changing it recently but it is backwards compatible.
The only problem, if you will, is the many different versions of the libraries the distros provide, but you can just link statically.
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Well I didn't get into clashes with it myself, but heard reports of the problem from multiple sides, including my bro's, so I'm a bit at unease about it in advance. But yea, when I think about it, it should not be a problem of apps, just the drivers. But since OT is so sensitive about the drivers, I expect a lot of problems coming indirectly here. We'll have to detect driver versions that work, and announce to the user that they need to update or else nothing works. Updating means finding the right version for whatever ABI there's now, whenever the kernel updates and breaks stuff because for some reason there cannot be a stable ABI for graphics cards.
At least Linux users are used to it, so when OT doesn't work and we print that it's a driver problem, they will go and fix it (hopefully). Unlike when we print it on Windows, a large part of people still think OT is faulty because their other games work, why can't OT? We will have to do lots more of problem detection and auto-repair attempts to reduce the number of failed attempts to run OT, that is currently very high.
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But since OT is so sensitive about the drivers, I expect a lot of problems coming indirectly here. We'll have to detect driver versions that work, and announce to the user that they need to update or else nothing works.
Yeah, the drivers will likely have problems unfortunately. But there are already apps that do that. I know for instance kwin (https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kde-workspace/repository/revisions/master/show/kwin), but i don't know exactly how.
Updating means finding the right version for whatever ABI there's now, whenever the kernel updates and breaks stuff because for some reason there cannot be a stable ABI for graphics cards.
Mmh, that's not a problem. The ATI and Nvidia proprietary drivers are composed of a binary closed blob and a little module that you compile for your kernel version. So if you update the kernel or the driver you just need to recompile that little module. Not so much user friendly but not a stopper either.
Actually I recalled there is a thing that changes its ABI and which requires the drivers to be updated by the vendors: X11. But drawing with OpenGL bypasses X so i don't think that will cause any problem with OT.
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Updating means finding the right version for whatever ABI there's now, whenever the kernel updates and breaks stuff because for some reason there cannot be a stable ABI for graphics cards.
Mmh, that's not a problem. The ATI and Nvidia proprietary drivers are composed of a binary closed blob and a little module that you compile for your kernel version. So if you update the kernel or the driver you just need to recompile that little module. Not so much user friendly but not a stopper either.
Sounds a lot like an externally provided stable ABI interlayer, doesn't it? :)
Made to work around the fact that the ABI constantly changes and kernel devs don't want it to be stable. Kind of a logical thing to do, when there's no saner way to connect the two cultures. Still .. not ideal, IMHO.
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I agree it's not ideal, but I don't think you'll have problems regarding ABI changes. About drivers yes unfortunately, but not about the ABI. ;)
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I gave the 12.11 Beta 11's a try with the AMD 7970 and much to my surprise I'm getting pretty good results with Outerra (finally).
Right after installing Outerra I was able to start the program and update without any issues. After changing a few options in the Catalyst Control Center I tried to restart Outerra and received an error message that said I did not have a GPU that supported OpenGL 3.1 installed? I then returned the settings in the AMD CCC back to default and Outerra loaded without any problems. After changing some settings a second time in the CCC I didn't see the error message again.
FXAA is the only anti-aliasing method that works (I was unable to use the multi-sample AA options which I think is a known bug with Outerra and AMD GPU's).
Performance isn't up to what I've seen with the Nvidia 680 GTX and Outerra but it's getting there. So far the only graphics related glitch I've found is an unusual horizontal line across the terrain that can be seen in this screen shot just above the aircraft's instrument panel -
(http://imageshack.us/a/img341/9185/outerraamd79701211beta1.jpg)
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After changing a few options in the Catalyst Control Center I tried to restart Outerra and received an error message that said I did not have a GPU that supported OpenGL 3.1 installed? I then returned the settings in the AMD CCC back to default and Outerra loaded without any problems. After changing some settings a second time in the CCC I didn't see the error message again.
Odd, never saw anything like that. Was it after installing new Catalyst?
So far the only graphics related glitch I've found is an unusual horizontal line across the terrain that can be seen in this screen shot just above the aircraft's instrument panel
That glitch is because of some driver-enforced setting on textures that are used internally for math. I think it's anisotropic filtering - on textures that are not used for rendering but internally for computations it does what it's not supposed to do. I actually forgot that I wanted to ask AMD guys how to stop that behavior.
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Odd, never saw anything like that. Was it after installing new Catalyst?
I haven't either, the 12.11 Beta 11's were installed on a fresh OS so it's not an issue related to uninstalling the previous driver revision.
The only thing I can think of is a glitch in the CCC (possibly related to dot Net) after changing settings that made the GPU momentarily unrecognizable to Outerra.
That glitch is because of some driver-enforced setting on textures that are used internally for math. I think it's anisotropic filtering - on textures that are not used for rendering but internally for computations it does what it's not supposed to do. I actually forgot that I wanted to ask AMD guys how to stop that behavior.
That actually brings up some questions about how we should even have AMD GPU's configured in the Catalyst Control Center when running Outerra.
Anti-aliasing of course should be set to application preference but what about anisotropic filtering? Is Outerra using 16x AF by default (which would mean application preference should be used for AF also)? I also have AMD optimized unchecked to turn Tessellation off since it only effects DirectX 11 applications, would this be correct?
Finally the only other option I use for Outerra is the OpenGL triple buffering setting.
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The problem with AF is the one I described above, it cannot be applied universally, at least not until we find a way to turn it off for internal textures. I think we are using 8AF now.
Triple buffering is ok to enable, tesselation does not have effect.
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The problem with AF is the one I described above, it cannot be applied universally, at least not until we find a way to turn it off for internal textures. I think we are using 8AF now.
Thanks for clearing that up, this issue with AF and Outerra, it does apply to Nvidia also right?
Has there been any progress on getting multi-sampling AA available to ATI/AMD GPU's?
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I haven't tried it on Nvidia, it's generally suggested to leave these settings on the application so we rarely encounter this. There should be a way to avoid it by using a different sampling method, effectively not using AF for stuff that can't cope with it. I'm going to test it.
MSAA on ATI - we still haven't received reply from our primary contact, time to spam other ones we have there ...