video card freezes

[Dennis Laff]

HI i'm having trouble with the visulizer.I have 12 ccr's 128 lor channels 5 rainbow spots 5rainbow wall washers the actual show ran fine outside for christmas but now in the house when i run the visulizer the video card freezes up for a few seconds then starts again. I"m thinking i need a better grafic card any thoughts? Thanks Dennis Laff

[WilliamS]

There could be a few things at play here not all could be blamed on the video card itself.

What hardware do you have to support the video card, processor type, memory type and amount, and of course what kind of video card. As well what windows version are you running XP, Vista, 7 and 32 bit or 64 bit.

If theres a pause before the animation plays, how long is the pause, what else is affected during the pause, such as does the mouse no longer respond, do the lights on the PC flicker in terms of showing a busy status on the Hard drive?

[jem5136]

It might just be LOR. My computer has a lots of memory and a nice processor and a nice graphics card, but I have had sequences with 22 CCRs plus 128 channels of LOR channels where it freezes up for a second or 2 when I am working with it, but neither RAM nor CPU are not maxed out when it freezes. I don't know this for sure, but I think LOR might have put some kind of limit to how much RAM and CPU it can pull, so it prevents the computer from going to the blue screen or anything like that; but that's just my theory.
So I don't think it is your graphics card, I think it is the software limiting itself from a crash (which has happened to me before).

[WilliamS]

I thought Dan in 3.1.4 did something for memory consumption. As jem5136 pointed out most of our rigs do it. It could just be buffering the nearly 2000 channels your running, not exactly a light load, or in Jems case over 3400! Impressive!

[jem5136]

GoofyGuy wrote:

I thought Dan in 3.1.4 did something for memory consumption. As jem5136 pointed out most of our rigs do it. It could just be buffering the nearly 2000 channels your running, not exactly a light load, or in Jems case over 3400! Impressive!

The 22 CCRs wasn't my show, the sequences were for a customer of mine. But I will be running over 450 RGB pixels for Halloween and Christmas this year plus about 80 regular channels, and so far I have had a little bit of freezing, but nothing too worry about.

[WilliamS]

jem5136 wrote:

GoofyGuy wrote:

I thought Dan in 3.1.4 did something for memory consumption. As jem5136 pointed out most of our rigs do it. It could just be buffering the nearly 2000 channels your running, not exactly a light load, or in Jems case over 3400! Impressive!

The 22 CCRs wasn't my show, the sequences were for a customer of mine. But I will be running over 450 RGB pixels for Halloween and Christmas this year plus about 80 regular channels, and so far I have had a little bit of freezing, but nothing too worry about.

Im a tad over 2000 total channels at this point for this years display. It takes about 10 seconds from play to actual start in the editor and visualizer to fire up. I assume its buffering the audio and the vis. If was locking up for longer than that I would have a few questions but its a software thing In my opinion in my case.

[LOR Staff]

There are several posts here concerning the Visualizer and performance. The most important thing is to reduce the overall size of your entire simulation. The max background is 2500x2500, but you should be using something MUCH smaller (Say 800x600).

[Dennis Laff]

I"m running windows 7 it seem to better if i move a little slower with the mouse.

[Dennis Laff]

the processor is AMD Athlon II X2 240 32 bit memory is 4 gb speed pc2-6400 mb/sec video card GeForce 6150se Thanks for any help Dennis Laff

[George Simmons]

jem5136 wrote:

... and so far I have had a little bit of freezing, but nothing too worry about.

I can't tell you how grateful I was to see this thread. Not wishing problems on others, but rather making me feel better that I wasn't the only one whose video driver was freezing up. (My PC is very similar to the specs Dennis cited and I've also seen it occur almost exclusively with mouse movements.) In my case, though, it sometimes just freezes for a couple seconds and other times it locks up the entire machine and the only thing I can do is shut it down the ugly way - pulling the plug.

At first, I thought it was due to my second monitor. When I switched back to just one monitor it seemed to go away. I didn't associate it with LOR (or the Visualizer) at first because I almost always have S3 open. But I took a couple days off from sequencing the same time I shut down the second monitor. As soon as I started sequencing again, it came back.

Having read this thread and comparing Dennis' and Jem's experiences with mine, I'm now of the opinion that it's definitely something in the software. I'm not convinced it's necessarily due to the Visualizer, because I don't often have the Visualizer open. Hopefully, others having this same condition will chime in and LOR can figure out what it is. I sure don't want to go into next show season without it having been corrected.

[LOR Staff]

Believe it or not, a whole bunch of things happen in Windows when you move the mouse. You wouldn't think that something as simple as dragging the cursor around would use much CPU, but it does.

Well, that's not 100% true. It's not that it uses that much CPU. What does happen though is EVERY application and service you have running could be notified about a 1 pixel move of the mouse. That means every process has to look at what happened, decide if it needs to do something, and if not pass the mouse move on down the chain.

That CHAIN is what causes things to jump around and play catch-up. Each program in the chain has to process the movement, and only 1 at a time can do that. Generally EVERY program in that chain must process the mouse move before Windows will allow programs to do any actual 'work'.

Since programs like the Sequence Editor and the Visualizer need to be as 'real time' as possible, you'll notice the effect a lot more than if you were running something like a word processor. You are most likely going to see a 'jump' if any delay is 50Ms or longer.

The news gets even worse. If I am not mistaken, since a mouse move could be consumed by any program in the chain, the processing of the mouse move must be SINGLE threaded. Even if you have a quad or hex core processor, everything running on those 3 or 5 other cores is going to be suspended until the mouse move is processed by the chain.

Up to this point, we have only been talking about a 1 pixel move. What happens if you move the mouse MORE than 1 pixel (and trust me, you do)? Windows will send MULTIPLE 'mouse move events' to the chain. Thankfully we don't get an event for EVERY pixel, but we do get a LOT of them. A 950 pixel move which is only about 1/2 a screen, may generate 300-500 mouse move events. It's varies depending on how fast you move the mouse, what else is running, etc.

Since no Windows program knows exactly how much processing time it is going to get at any one moment, programmers must take that into account. Programs like the Sequence Editor and the Visualizer deal with that by buffering our updates. Updating the screen is typically the most processor intensive thing a program can do, so we reserve doing that until we've processed all our data. In the eyes of the Visualizer, that may mean processing several centi-seconds worth of commands to 'catch up' and then finally updating the screen.

In theory, you could move your mouse fast enough that it would also make your controllers lag. The reason why you can't make it happen (or don't notice) is that sending data out a serial port is magnitudes easier for a computer than drawing graphics - which includes re-drawing that arrow at a new location.

In many ways, moving your mouse is one of the most complex things your computer has to process.

[jem5136]

I wanted to mention, I have been experiencing these little freezes since before S3. I've had them since I started sequencing thousands of channels in a single sequence, which was in S2, and they don't change if I have the visualizer open in S3; and this is all on the same computer.

[George Simmons]

I had some of those issues with multi-track sequences in S2 also, but not since upgrading to a newer PC during the fall of '10.

I upgraded to a second monitor about the same time the first S3 beta came out. From then right up through early December I sequenced 600+ channels with two monitors - the second one setup as a continuation of the first. I used the second one for the animation and for a small Vis canvas that had a spiral tree and a single CCR. Never had a single problem.

After Christmas, I downloaded the then-current beta, and at almost the same time began having lock-up issues. (No change after moving to the latest beta.) Always the same error message when it locks up temporarily about my video driver stopped responding but has recovered. When it locks up completely there is no error message - everything just suddenly stops responding. Curiously, if the SE is playing a sequence at the time, which has been the case more than once, the music will continue to the end of the song. After that, I've left the PC for as long as an hour to see if it recovers but it never does. Needs to be cut off at the surge protector and then restarted.

Coincidence? Maybe. I allowed Windows to update itself after show season also. Others here having the same problem? Well, that's starting to stretch the coincidence theory a little... I'm hoping to learn more because there's clearly something going on with my PC right now that only seems to occur while I'm using the Sequence Editor and I'm not liking it much.

[jem5136]

My computer also is set up with 2 monitors, but I've never experienced problems to that extent. What OS are you running? I'm running Windows 7 and both of my monitors are 24" widescreen displays, one of them is HD, so it is drawing a lot out of the computer; but I still don't understand why you have had so many issues with it freezing to the point where you have to unplug your computer.

[George Simmons]

jem5136 wrote:

My computer also is set up with 2 monitors, but I've never experienced problems to that extent. What OS are you running? I'm running Windows 7 and both of my monitors are 24" widescreen displays, one of them is HD, so it is drawing a lot out of the computer; but I still don't understand why you have had so many issues with it freezing to the point where you have to unplug your computer.

I'm running Windows 7, Home Premium, 64 bit, SP1, one 22" monitor and one 24" monitor.

[jem5136]

George Simmons wrote:
I'm running Windows 7, Home Premium, 64 bit, SP1, one 22" monitor and one 24" monitor. 

Weird, almost everything is the same as my system, except for the monitors.

[texascop]

There is another thread like this I posted this informaiton to. My laptop (HP, AMD processor, 3GB memory, Win 7 Home Prem. 32-bit) is almost useless for sequencing now. It will run the show fine but the sequence will lag, jump, start, stop while running the grid and/or visualizer. I have two desktops with Intel processors. One is 64-bit OS (8GB memory) and the other 32-bit (2GB memory). No problems sequencing on them. I don't think memory is an issue but lean toward the onboard graphics being too slow or not enough graphics memory to handle/process the display load. The AMD processor may also be an issue. I have a single monitor and my sequences aren't very complex, 80 channels and one CCR.

[jem5136]

texascop wrote:

There is another thread like this I posted this informaiton to. My laptop (HP, AMD processor, 3GB memory, Win 7 Home Prem. 32-bit) is almost useless for sequencing now. It will run the show fine but the sequence will lag, jump, start, stop while running the grid and/or visualizer. I have two desktops with Intel processors. One is 64-bit OS (8GB memory) and the other 32-bit (2GB memory). No problems sequencing on them. I don't think memory is an issue but lean toward the onboard graphics being too slow or not enough graphics memory to handle/process the display load. The AMD processor may also be an issue. I have a single monitor and my sequences aren't very complex, 80 channels and one CCR.

I don't know if it is the AMD processor that is the issue, my processor is an AMD Phenom II X6 Processor, and I haven't had any issues, and on my other computers (which are laptop and desktop) they have AMD and Intel, and they don't act any different from this computer when it comes to sequencing. I do have a netbook which I used to run my show last year (just 184 channels) and it handled the sequences fine, along with the show. I'm kinda excited to see how it handles running the pixels I am adding this year.

[WilliamS]

jem5136 wrote:

texascop wrote:

There is another thread like this I posted this informaiton to. My laptop (HP, AMD processor, 3GB memory, Win 7 Home Prem. 32-bit) is almost useless for sequencing now. It will run the show fine but the sequence will lag, jump, start, stop while running the grid and/or visualizer. I have two desktops with Intel processors. One is 64-bit OS (8GB memory) and the other 32-bit (2GB memory). No problems sequencing on them. I don't think memory is an issue but lean toward the onboard graphics being too slow or not enough graphics memory to handle/process the display load. The AMD processor may also be an issue. I have a single monitor and my sequences aren't very complex, 80 channels and one CCR.

I don't know if it is the AMD processor that is the issue, my processor is an AMD Phenom II X6 Processor, and I haven't had any issues, and on my other computers (which are laptop and desktop) they have AMD and Intel, and they don't act any different from this computer when it comes to sequencing. I do have a netbook which I used to run my show last year (just 184 channels) and it handled the sequences fine, along with the show. I'm kinda excited to see how it handles running the pixels I am adding this year.

I know my home computer is in for a surprise when I hit it with a few thousand channels. Ive gone overbaord on pixels, and the 7 year old PC that I have Im almost certain will not handle it. What Im looking into either a high end Laptop, which will suffer becuase of on board video, or another desktop that will limit where I can sequence.