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!
There's a newer version of d3dcompiler_47.dll here, likely for
your Windows 7. But not for Windows 10. It might have
something to do with DirectX 11, because someone reported
a failure of a DirectX 11 application after this was installed.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...ent-on-windows
I found that file present in the Affinity Photo
trial version installer package,
Download: Affinity Photo 1.5.2.69 | 281 MB (10 Days free trial)
https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/a...dows+Trial.exe
which is why I've been researching in that direction.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/...from-compiling
The Mac version uses OpenGL. But in a comic twist, the PC
version of this program uses DirectX11. This means the company
has to do twice as much work, keeping two graphics chain
developments going.
LibreOffice for example, uses OpenGL acceleration on Linux,
and it's not hard to see why they would not use OpenGL
acceleration in Windows (because OpenGL support was present
there for a long time too).
There's nothing wrong with DirectX11. It just means their
developers "have to be good at something", and what are
the odds they're good at both graphics paths.
Since it's DirectX11, we don't have to worry about the buggy
"OpenGL Out Of Memory" problem on Windows 10, which was caused
by a refusal of the graphics card companies to put in a subroutine
to handle it right. That used to cause LibreOffice to crash.
If your graphics card is supported, that might be fixed by now.
(My graphics cards were out of support.)
Windows 10 has a "GPU status" in Task Manager, but it *only*
works, if a certain level of WDDM driver is available. On
an older card (my HD6450), I didn't get to see GPU status. The
replacement card I've got now, has the GPU status in Task Manager.
It shows the percentage of GPU ram used, and also the percentage
of GPU loading. If the card has a power limiter and measurement
capability, you even get a pretend power figure for the card
(about 9W at idle on mine maybe, 182W when the limiter engages).
The next best thing, is GPUZ. If you're unsupported the other
way, you can try this, and watch for an hour, out of the corner
of your eye, and see if all the GPU memory is used up.
https://www.techpowerup.com/download/techpowerup-gpu-z/
# The download link I got.
http://us2-dl.techpowerup.com/files/...U-Z.2.15.0.exe
You can use things like Driver Verifier, which looks for
memory problems in drivers. To get the best benefit from this,
you have to find an article with suggested "switches" for the
command line. My experience with this is, I didn't learn anything
by using it, but just switching it on, stopped my crashes!
Which means as a debugging tool, it could be useless, and
not give you info on root cause. I don't think I'd try this
a second time, because I really don't know what I'm doing
with some of the switches.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/win...river-verifier
Windows 10 has the Reliability monitor. Type "Reliability"
into the Cortana search hole, to gain access. It gives a
report of various things that have happened on the machine,
without the annoyances of starting with EventVwr.msc first.
Paul