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perplexing driver and black screen problem



 
 
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  #1  
Old December 6th 18, 08:32 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
JBI
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 76
Default perplexing driver and black screen problem

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!
Ads
  #2  
Old December 6th 18, 09:03 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
Bill in Co[_3_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 303
Default perplexing driver and black screen problem

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!


Could running Process Explorer in the background possibly work and be of any
help? That may be a long shot though, if you're getting a black screen and
no cursor. At any rate, it sounds like you have at least narrowed it down
the program itself (presumably running out of resources and not cleaning up
after itself in its usage of ram), and not the video drivers. I bet Paul
will have some better suggestions, though.


  #3  
Old December 6th 18, 09:08 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
JBI
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 76
Default perplexing driver and black screen problem

On 12/6/18 2:40 PM, KenW wrote:
On Thu, 6 Dec 2018 14:32:59 -0500, 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!


What cards and their memory ?


The ATI Radeon HD 3870 (currently installed):

total avail graphics memory: 3323 MB

dedicated video memory: 512 MB

system video memory: 0 MB

shared system memory: 2811 MB

The Gigabyte GeForce 210 1 GB DDR3:

Memory Detail: 1024MB DDR3


Unfortunately, that's all I have on the GeForce since not currently
installed (had to look up the specs).


  #4  
Old December 6th 18, 10:21 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
Paul[_32_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 11,873
Default perplexing driver and black screen problem

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
  #5  
Old December 6th 18, 11:17 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
VanguardLH[_2_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 10,881
Default perplexing driver and black screen problem

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!


Before you installed the Affinity program, were you loading your
computer as heavily? I don't know that program but some graphics
programs, especially editors or converters, will load the CPU (and GPU).
I've seen complaints by Affinity Designer users of a constantly high CPU
load when the program is loaded but idle. A higher load generates more
heat, especially if constantly elevated. The users noted their
temperatures were consistently far higher and the fans spinning on high
while Designer was loaded, so they had to exit the program rather than
leave it loaded. Seem affected by the type of docs left open and how
many: the more docs concurrently open and more complex then the higher
the CPU usage, and that equates into more heat. Apparently cycling
(tabbing) through the docs gets the program to reduce its CPU
consumption. See:

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/ind...age-when-idle/
(a community to get focused help on THAT software)

Looks like AD (and possibly AP) are computationally intensive even when
they aren't doing anything, just sitting idle with half a dozen image
docs left open in the programs. There's something wrong with their
software. That thread went from this spring to late fall of this year,
so I doubt the bug has been fixed.

Desktops will usually run okay at constant higher temperatures. They
are more open, airflow is easier (less resistance to movement), and
there is more than one fan moving the air (PSU and case fan pushing out,
CPU fan moving air, GPU pushing out, and optionally front fans pushing
in). Laptops only have one fan and airflow is restricted, so they don't
run reliably at high temperatures and will either throttle the CPU (gets
slow) or stop the hardware for self-protection. We don't know on what
type of computer you are having the hanging black screen; however, since
you mentioned switching video cards, yours isn't a laptop, or smaller.

You sure there isn't dust and lint piled up atop the components (those
are thermal insulators that prevent heat from escaping from the
components), or blocking airflow through the heatsink fins (CPU, GPU,
memory, chipset) or the fans (CPU, GPU, PSU, case)? Even flat ribbon
cables can present huge dams against airflow if they are positioned
perpendicular to the airflow.

Have you checked inside the unidentified computer that no heatsinks fell
off? It happens. Are all the fans still spinning? When the load goes
up and temperature rises, do the fans speed up? There are monitoring
programs that will tell you the temperatures of the CPU, GPU, case, and
drives. For some reason, the salvage computer that I use could not
thermally regulate the CPU fan speed, so I got Speedfan which monitors
and shows various temperatures and will control the fans to make sure
they are spinning fast enough to cool properly. The only fan I don't
have it control is the GPU since its firmware handles that. My video
card has 2 fans and one went bad (too much bearing friction slowing its
RPM but also stalling when it would start to spin up). Instead of
buying a new card, I bought a fan kit for that brand and model at eBay.
A lot less noise now from the video card's fans.

Install some temperature monitoring software (something that shows a
history, so you can see the rise and fall of temperatures) that load on
Windows startup or when you login. Shutoff the computer and let it cool
for a hour, or more. Turn it on, load AP with whatever typical set of
docs you open in AP, and watch the temperatures of various devices (CPU,
GPU, case, drives). I suspect you have a heat-related problem caused by
buggy software constantly consuming too many CPU cycles even when idle.
  #6  
Old December 8th 18, 07:43 AM posted to alt.windows7.general
Paul[_32_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 11,873
Default perplexing driver and black screen problem

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
  #7  
Old December 8th 18, 07:26 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
JBI
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 76
Default perplexing driver and black screen problem

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.Â* I am running a program called Affinity Photo
on a Dell XPS 420 with 8 GB Ram.Â* 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.Â* 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.Â*Â* 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.Â* As I say,
mostly black screen in Win 10 but sometimes 7 as well.Â* Latest video
drivers used for each card.

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

Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions!


I tested

Â*Â* affinity-photo-1.6.5.123.exeÂ*Â* 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.

Â*Â* 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.
  #8  
Old December 8th 18, 08:05 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
Bill in Co[_3_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 303
Default perplexing driver and black screen problem

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.


  #9  
Old December 14th 18, 06:36 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
JBI
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 76
Default perplexing driver and black screen problem

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.
  #10  
Old December 15th 18, 12:06 AM posted to alt.windows7.general
Paul[_32_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 11,873
Default perplexing driver and black screen problem

JBI wrote:


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.


Use the front panel "RESET" button, not the "POWER" button...

SATA doesn't have RESET, so the SSD drive cannot "feel" a
RESET event. Abrupt power loss isn't particularly good for
an SSD. We think the drives can handle it... until they don't.

By pressing the reset, that leaves the NTFS partition in
an inconsistent state - but that's what the playback journal
is for on the next boot. And by using RESET, the SSD doesn't
realize there was a "change of ownership" at the software level.
For the SSD, it's just business as usual.

*******

The developers of "affinity-photo-1.6.5.123.exe" had the option
of going with OpenGL or with DirectX and they chose DirectX11.

DirectX seems to have pretty poor support on the Microsoft site.
There is a platform update, bringing DX11 to DX11.1. I can't
tell from this, whether "game specific patches" were released,
which would also correct other deficiencies in the code.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/down....aspx?id=36805

The hazy history of DirectX11 is here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX#DirectX_11

Paul
 




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