8 replies to this topic

[starstutter]

Hey guys.
The more I think about asking this, the more it sounds like:
"sumone hlp plz, my game said 'has stopped working' so what is wrong?"

So yeah its kind of a last resort really asking about it. I'm sure you guys have seen this before, and most sources say its a driver issue specific to your computer. However I would still like to avoid it.

One of the things I've noticed about this error is that it starts happening when a shader becomes too large. Either that or I have a dynamic loop like :
(for i = 0; i < sampleCount; i++), depending on the number of instructions inside the loop, if I go upwards of about 300-400 iterations it downright crashes. It doesn't really seem to matter whats inside the loop (ie texture samples, heavy math computation, ect)

Could this be some kind of video memory or bandwidth issue? Have you guys encountered this much? What is a good way to avoid it (generally speaking of course, not just shaders)? This is a laptop card that supports SM 3.0 (8700 M GT)



Thanks for any help.

[XVincentX]

May we try your application? Just to ensure if there is a driver "limit".

[starstutter]

XVincentX said:

May we try your application? Just to ensure if there is a driver "limit".

well, honestly I would, but its not anywhere near ready to be distributed to anybody. At the moment there are a lot of specific dependancies that keep it from working on most computers.

[alphadog]

Which card and driver version? Which OS?

It's possible your workload is occasionally causing a timeout by overwhelming the card but not causing it to crash or anything. You can futz with registry settings to up the timeout limit and see if your card keeps complaining. Open regedit and do a find for the TdrDelay DWORD. Up it from the default of 2 and see if you still get the timeouts.

See: http://www.microsoft...dm_timeout.mspx

[starstutter]

alphadog said:

It's possible your workload is occasionally causing a timeout by overwhelming the card but not causing it to crash or anything. You can futz with registry settings to up the timeout limit and see if your card keeps complaining. Open regedit and do a find for the TdrDelay DWORD. Up it from the default of 2 and see if you still get the timeouts.

hmmm... I see. Makes since and my train of thought was something like that. I am using vista, and unfortunatley I don't know what driver. What I do know is that it's not one from nvidia, because how ironic, they don't make a driver for that card (at least not when I bought it). Seriously, I looked for 6 hours on their website and on the net and nothing definitive came up.

Anway, so thanks for the tip and that answers my question. No, I don't think I need to mess with the settings, but its nice to know the option is open.

[alphadog]

Laptop drivers go through OEM testing, and some OEMs can be slow-to-non-existant with updating video drivers, so you have to look around in forums and such.

Did you rummage around here?
http://www.laptopvid...p?showforum=139

[Kenneth Gorking]

There are new laptop drivers out today, including support for your card:
http://www.nvidia.co...86.03_whql.html

[starstutter]

alphadog said:

Did you rummage around here?
http://www.laptopvid...p?showforum=139

haha, if I remember right, this is actually the place I got it from :)

[Dia]

AFAIK, Vista can attempt to recover timeouts that occur in drivers, which is why you get that message. On XP, most likely you'd get a BSOD.