edward Posted November 28, 2005 Share Posted November 28, 2005 I just tried the latest WHQL certified drivers from nVidia, 81.95 on WinXP. Avoid it like the plague. It crashes Houdini randomly (and often) when redrawing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
megalith Posted November 28, 2005 Share Posted November 28, 2005 Thanks for the warning edward...was just about to install them. It's unfortunate when newer drivers create incompatibilities. ~megalith Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
edward Posted November 28, 2005 Author Share Posted November 28, 2005 Another voodoo thing about the drivers is that it would cause Houdini to go to 100% CPU usage as soon as you start it up. I've gone back to 71.84 and things are back to normal again. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
edward Posted November 28, 2005 Author Share Posted November 28, 2005 I've tried the 81.67 drivers now and same CPU usage problem. I didn't bother to use Houdini enough to find out if the random crashing problem was there too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AdamJ Posted November 29, 2005 Share Posted November 29, 2005 go figure..I'm running 81.94, it took me a while before these worked. I went through bunch of them from 6xxx, 7xxx and now 8xxx versions before staying with these onse. Seems the drivers are very tempermental. One thing I learned is to make sure to properly uninstall old drivers before installing new onse. For me this was as follows - reboot into safe mode with winxp - uninstall drivers through the control panel - run 'Driver Cleaner Pro' (it finds any files related to the driver and removes them; funny since there shouldnt be any as you've just uninstalled it hehe but there are) - reboot into regular windows - bypass any driver setup wizards that windows may pop up - run the setup.exe for the drivers you want to install - reboot when prompted after installation Doing these got out the weird lockups I would get after installing fresh drivers. But with all that said it still took me forever to find onse that worked well for my system. Milage may vary as they say... the Cleaner utility http://www.drivercleaner.net/ different driver versions www.guru3d.com Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
edward Posted November 29, 2005 Author Share Posted November 29, 2005 Ok, I tried exactly what you said AdamJ and no difference (after several million reboots ). Do you not see the CPU usage going bezerk in the Task Manager when just opening a default Houdini session? If you just open up a default Houdini, the CPU usage should stay at 0 unless you're doing something with it. The problem exists in both 81.67 and 81.95 so chances are that it exists in 81.94 as well. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AdamJ Posted November 29, 2005 Share Posted November 29, 2005 When I open a fresh houdini the cpu usage is pretty much at zero. Which card do you have? I have the BFG 6800GT. I read somewhere that the 8xxx series are not that great for the 'older' cards. They are more for 7800 cards and SLI setups. My only suggestions would be to go back to 7xxx or 6xxx series. Funnily I was running the 6xxx series for the longest time without any problems. Then one day I decided to try the newer versions and was never able to get a stable system with the older onse anymore. It's all voodoo magic! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
edward Posted November 29, 2005 Author Share Posted November 29, 2005 No, we've been able to reproduce this on a 7800GT as well. Perhaps its some setting you have set in particular different from the defaults. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
malexander Posted November 29, 2005 Share Posted November 29, 2005 I read in the release notes that Nvidia has optimized its 81.xx drivers for Dual core processors (meaning they threaded at least portions of the driver, something that makes me shudder a bit). Perhaps you need an SMP system to see this problem. Are you using a single or dual processor system, AdamJ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AdamJ Posted November 29, 2005 Share Posted November 29, 2005 I had the buffer/overlay variables set before.. not sure if I'm using them anymore.. I'll check it when I get home. btw I'm running the 410 release. edit: single intel P4 3.06 - hyperthreading on Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AdamJ Posted November 30, 2005 Share Posted November 30, 2005 just checked my environment variables.. HOUDINI_OGL_DBL_BUFFER_FIX=0 HOUDINI_OGL_DISABLE_RASTER_IN_OVERLAY=0 HOUDINI_UISCALE=75 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
edward Posted December 3, 2005 Author Share Posted December 3, 2005 It turns out that the drivers have a problem with my dual P4 2.4 GHz w/HyperThreading enabled. I turned off HyperThreading and the CPU usage problem went away. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wolfwood Posted December 7, 2005 Share Posted December 7, 2005 Anyone brave enough to try the new Nvidia Linux drivers? 1.0-8174 http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
malexander Posted December 8, 2005 Share Posted December 8, 2005 I have a dual-core Athlon and I still get the 100% CPU cooking. Athlons do not have hyperthreading. Perhaps the driver treats a single dual-core CPU differently than dual single-core CPU setup? (though I have no idea why they would do this..). Or perhaps it's an Athlon thing. I'm running the 81.94 Nvidia drivers (WindowXP SP2). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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