On 12/8/18 2:05 PM, Bill in Co wrote:
JBI wrote:
On 12/8/18 1:43 AM, Paul wrote:
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

Thanks for trying to help! I fired up the program yesterday while
keeping an eye on the task manager as well as logging with the program
you recommended (GPUZ). So far, no more black screens, but I probably
didn't push it enough yet. I am going to try again today.

So far, the only things I'm seeing when trying to carry out more complex
operations is greatly increased CPU, which jumps up to 80%+ at times.
GPU has increased off and on topping out at around 25%. I've set up log
recording in GPUZ, so if I end up with a black screen again and have to
reboot, maybe the log will reveal something.

And there's always that off chance that just running that extra program
(GPUZ) concurrently might render it stable.



Just a follow up: Despite all efforts, I continue to have random black
screening usually within an hour of doing fairly intensive work within
the program.

I monitored task manager, GPUZ, and another program to keep an eye on
things. Although CPU would increase to near 100% at times, it always
dropped back down, hard drive percentage hardly varied more than 10% and
memory generally stayed at 75% or less. There was question whether or
not CPU might be an issue so I started running "CPU burner" of Furmark
before starting Affinity. Even opening large files and CPU would
seemingly shoot to 100%, no black screens.

I'm about out of options here. Reliability monitor usually shows these
incidents, and there has been a Win created crash file or two indicating
"hardware failure", but doesn't say what hardware. So, pretty much
running blind.

One question I have.... since I am using an SSD drive and keep having to
manually shut down and reboot by pressing the power button when I get
the black screens, will frequently doing this harm the SSD? In the days
when I had HDD, such actions were definitely damaging to the HD, but not
sure about SSD. If so, then I may have to either go back to Photoshop
or find another Photoshop alternative.