Paul wrote:
JBI wrote:
Ok, Ive been round and round with the developers on this issue now and
time to turn here. I am running a program called Affinity Photo on a
Dell XPS 420 with 8 GB Ram. I am using both Win 10 and 7 (dual boot
with either OS chosen at startup).

The problem I'm having is that within an hour or so fairly heavy use
of the program, I get a sudden black screen with no cursor...
nothing... and the only way I can get everything back is to reboot.
The developers are quite active when it comes to resolving issues and
I have sent them crash reports, but I don't always get such reports
with the black screen issue, only if I am getting exception errors.

They keep telling me that it looks like some incompatibility between
my video card driver and their program, but say the driver is at fault
and not the program. My big issue with this is that I have tried
using two separate video cards, with former card uninstalled and
latest drivers reinstalled per respective card, and the black screens
still occur no matter the card.

The two cards I have tried are the ATI Radeon HD 3870 and the Ge Force
210. I get black screens with each card within an hour or two after
running heavy image editing/processing operations in Affinity. I get
no black screening with any video intensive games, nor any other
application, only Affinity, yet Affinity says it's likely the video
driver (but both drivers?).

If anyone has some ideas, I would sure welcome them. As I say, mostly
black screen in Win 10 but sometimes 7 as well. Latest video drivers
used for each card.

Been trying to nail this down for over a month now. From the
beginning after Affinity install have I had the black screening. I am
trying beta versions, same thing. I have been running Win in clean
boot mode, same thing.

Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions!

I tested

affinity-photo-1.6.5.123.exe 315,270,928 bytes

and the only thing I can see, is the "3D" graph on my GPU usage
blipping when some operation is going on. It's hard to say
whether this is just writes to the frame buffer, or shaders
are being used to process pixels. The level of activity
is more than frame buffer writes, but it's pretty difficult
to "rail" my video card (only Furmark has done that so far,
and I was running out of tests to rail the video card with
and using Furmark is essentially declaring defeat). If a program
was using shader assist to process something, sometimes the
number of shaders scheduled, is too low to make a good "blip"
on the activity graph.

One weird thing, is an Affinity "sample photo" was over a
hundred megabytes download. And the resolution and color
of the image might take say, 3MB to 4MB under normal
conditions (a similar image from my digital point-and-shot
camera). Whatever they're doing, sure takes a lot of
storage space for a sample image.

I could not see enough "meat" in the program, to make
a good test case for stability testing. I wouldn't expect
a "gaussian blur" to tip over the program.

The RAM usage on the GPU is very close to zero, so that's
probably not it (a GPU memory leak).

I *did* see something pretty weird going on when the program
was installed. There were possibly some NVidia "shim" entries
in Task Manager, which promptly disappeared, so maybe the
program was doing something with respect to the video card.
But I don't know how to trace what that activity might have
been.

The program looks like little more than GIMP, and I can't
see anything complex enough in there, to be a culprit.
Only if some code was specifically designed to mess
with the video card, should the screen go black. Even
if a program ran out of System RAM, it would just
error out and the desktop would continue on.

And if it does mess with the video card, then I
need to find the "hairiest" thing it does with the
video card, for a stability test.

Paul