Re: MacBook Pro/GeForce8600M freezes using 3D textures

• Subject: Re: MacBook Pro/GeForce8600M freezes using 3D textures
• From: Andy O'Meara <email@hidden>
• Date: Fri, 9 May 2008 16:54:09 -0400
• Delivered-to: email@hidden
• Delivered-to: email@hidden

On May 9, 2008, at 4:26 PM, John Stiles wrote:

In your case, is it an option to just send them your app as-is, along with steps to repro the issue?

Andy

On May 9, 2008, at 4:26 PM, John Stiles wrote:

In your case, is it an option to just send them your app as-is, along with steps to repro the issue?

For us, we can't do this because we guard our IP and unreleased products very seriously, since leaks are out of the question. So instead we have our test harness, which we can send because there's no game code. But Apple typically just wants something they can run and view the problem themselves, and if your app is reproducing the issue and you don't mind if they see your app, that should be enough.


Andy O'Meara wrote:

I couldn't agree more with you regarding the returns of Blizzard's efforts. The rub, however, is that many software companies are significantly smaller than Blizzard and don't have the leverage (and income) from products like WOW and SC2. If you look the commitment of developing and maintaining test/diagnostic software that Apple can use in their automated graphics QA system as a ratio of the resources required over the company's total engineering capacity, that ratio is quite different between a large company and a very small company. For a company like Blizzard, that ratio is probably in the neighborhood of .01%. For us, it's more like 3-5%. Also, you have to consider the absolute size of our respective customer bases as well. I obviously can't tell you what Blizzard takes in for receipts from its Mac OS X users, but I can tell you that it's *much* larger than any small company's Mac OS X receipts. For example, our gross receipts from Mac OS X sales aren't even enough to support the wages of even a single developer-- and remember: that's *gross* receipts. If you factor in what percent of our dev time goes into supporting Mac OS (vs. Direct3D/ Windows), we actually operate at a significant loss (Mac OS X wise) as it is.

Anyway, Blizzard publishes and operates the most successful and largest MMORPG game to date. No disrespect, but Apple would be foolish to not be responsive to Blizzard's dev needs and radars. I don't mean to be negative or anything, I'm just trying to give you a glimpse of life on the small company side. All this stuff just hits close to home because the more our company tries to be creative with 3D technology, the more we just get roped up in OpenGL and Direct3D pain that ultimately ends with our personal life evaporating and our quality of life ending up in the toilet. Meanwhile, the 3D teams at companies like Apple, MS, Intel, AMD, and nVidia can only follow market forces, so I can't blame them either.

On May 9, 2008, at 1:48 PM, John Stiles wrote:

For what it's worth, at Blizzard we've invested a sizable chunk of development into making a test harness so that we can easily reproduce OpenGL/driver issues and send it to Apple without sending out actual intellectual-property or unreleased products, and it's made a world of difference for getting issues resolved. If they can't actually run the program and see the bug in front of them, the odds of getting things fixed go way down (they have no way of checking their fixes to see if they actually resolve the issue at hand—imagine debugging this way!).


Andy O'Meara wrote:

Interesting that this was raised--I'm currently drafting a radar on a nVidia system-wide hard lockup that's highly reproducible under one of our particular products. We've got some customers reporting that after running one of our titles for 5-10 minutes, their system completely hard-locks and they need to do a *hard* reset! Scary stuff!! One of the of the guys has been enormously patient and owns a loaded, dual Xeon MacPro, so I feel like a jackass having to tell him that Apple and/or nVidia has let this kind of stuff through their QA (and as a result he gets to lose data, yay). It brings back memories of the caliber of crashes in the Mac OS 7/8/9 days...

Don't get me wrong, Geoff (and the other guys on the GPU teams), there's nothing I'd love more than to develop and submit a build of our software that gets rolled into Apple's automated graphics testing process. Unfortunately, however, we're a very small company, and we just can't afford to take the time out to develop (and maintain) something like that right now (a contributing factor is that Mac OS X sales only comprises a minority of our sales). If there ever was any incentive to develop and support a diagnostic build that would suit Apple's needs, then we'd be a lot more open to carving out the resources required to develop and maintain such a diagnostic build.

To anyone interested, I'll be posting a copy of the radar's contents here mac-opengl once I file it. I'm putting a chunk of time into it (sigh), gathering all the customer machine data, so hopefully it won't get thrown into a bottomless pit...

Andy

On May 9, 2008, at 6:16 AM, Pierre Guilluy wrote:

I use OpenGL 3D textures coupled with shader processing for color conversions and some effects in my company's real-time video mixing application.
It has been working great on thousands macs around the world for years - but it now totally fails on my MacBook Pro 2.2 / GeForce8600M, running 10.5.2:

Using OpenGL Profiler, I can clearly see my 3D textures are loaded correctly, but once a shader accesses a texture, my Mac display totally freezes, and the system log indicates:

Apr 29 16:53:18 MBP kernel[0]: AppleYukon2: 00000000,00000000 sk98osx_dnet - recovering from missed interrupt
Apr 29 16:53:18 MBP kernel[0]: [Parallels] IPI stat: rescheduled 1 cpus out of 2.
Apr 29 16:53:24 MBP kernel[0]: AppleYukon2: 00000000,00000000 sk98osx_dnet - recovering from missed interrupt
Apr 29 16:53:24 MBP kernel[0]: [Parallels] IPI stat: rescheduled 1 cpus out of 2.
Apr 29 16:53:25 MBP kernel[0]: NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel timeout!
Apr 29 16:53:29 MBP kernel[0]: AppleYukon2: 00000000,00000000 sk98osx_dnet - recovering from missed interrupt
Apr 29 16:53:29 MBP kernel[0]: nel exception! status = 0xffff info32 = 0x3 = Fifo: Unknown Method Error
Apr 29 16:53:29 MBP kernel[0]: 0000000b
Apr 29 16:53:29 MBP kernel[0]: NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel exception! status = 0xffff info32 = 0x3 = Fifo: Unknown Method Error
Apr 29 16:53:29 MBP kernel[0]: 0000000b
Apr 29 16:53:30 MBP kernel[0]: raphics channel exception! status = 0xffff info32 = 0x3 = Fifo: Unknown Method Error
Apr 29 16:53:30 MBP kernel[0]: 0000000b
Apr 29 16:53:30 MBP kernel[0]: NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel exception! status = 0xffff info32 = 0x3 = Fifo: Unknown Method Error
Apr 29 16:53:30 MBP kernel[0]: 0000000b
Apr 29 16:53:30 MBP kernel[0]: NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel exception! status = 0xffff info32 = 0x3 = Fifo: Unknown Method Error
Apr 29 16:53:30 MBP kernel[0]: 0000000b

... and so on, with no possible recovery, the only choice I have then is to reboot via ssh.

Then, I made some tests, and the only way I can use 3D textures without getting the graphics to freeze is to create a 3D texture with depth 1 (one slice) :-/

I found tens of posts on various forums complaining about the same graphics freezing problem on MBP/GeForce (while playing games, using iPhoto, etc), so I'm wondering if there's not a graphics driver problem somehow.

Did someone experience this kind of problem?

--
Pierre Guilluy | ArKaos dev team

=========================================================
Join ArKaos and kick-ass!
=========================================================
ArKaos is looking for more developers! Funded by recent successes ArKaos is now hiring more talented and creative programmers to join our dynamic development team. Contact us if you think you have the skills and want to be a part of pushing real-time video processing and application design to the edge.
See more on http://www.arkaos.net/jobs/
---------------------------------------------------------
ARKAOS VJ 3.6 - REAL TIME VIDEO MIXING SOFTWARE
=========================================================

Mail: email@hidden
Tel: +32 2 340 86 86 | Fax: +32 2 340 86 87

ArKaos s.a.
http://www.arkaos.net/   | http://www.nuvj.com/
http://forum.arkaos.net/ | http://support.arkaos.net/

195, Ch. de Bruxelles    | B1410 Waterloo, Belgium

_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
Mac-opengl mailing list      (email@hidden)
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/mac-opengl/email@hidden

This email sent to email@hidden

_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
Mac-opengl mailing list      (email@hidden)
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/mac-opengl/email@hidden

• Prev by Date: Re: MacBook Pro/GeForce8600M freezes using 3D textures
• Next by Date: Re: MacBook Pro/GeForce8600M freezes using 3D textures
• Previous by thread: Re: MacBook Pro/GeForce8600M freezes using 3D textures
• Next by thread: Re: MacBook Pro/GeForce8600M freezes using 3D textures
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread