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#1
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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! |
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#2
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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. |
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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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