Hi,
we are experiencing a strange out of memory condition with nvidia drivers on Vista 64. It happened very rarely with the 1xx driver series but drastically increased with the 2xx drivers (Several times a day).
The problem:
After working with our OpenGL app for some time suddenly all kinds of OpenGL calls fail. Most of the time binding an FBO fails with GL_FRAMEBUFFER_UNSUPPORTED but also other calls fail with GL_OUT_OF_MEMORY. I managed to get GLexpert running and it turned out that the FBO error is also caused by an out of memory condition. The driver seems to delay the allocation of render buffers and textures to the point they are first bound to an FBO in some cases and the GLexpert messages indicate that there is not enough memory for this leading to GL_FRAMEBUFFER_UNSUPPORTED. What also happens is that the driver falls back to software emulation from time to time. These problems occur sooner and sooner until even starting the application doesn’t work anymore and it eventually results in crashes in nvogl.dll. It helps a little bit to kill dwm.exe. This seems to free up at least some memory but at some point only rebooting helps. We have reports from Windows XP users that even worse things happen there resulting in bluescreens and corruption of other windows but it is not 100% sure this is related.
“Repro case”:
It seems like it happens more often in certain scenarios when the rendering loop is paused for a long time. For instance our editor app displays various preview windows and when cooking a project it launches a player app to check if the cooked projects actually runs. During this time the editor render loop is paused. The same thing happens in one of our tests. A lot of resources are created and released but almost no rendering occurs. This is complete guesswork though and might be completely coincidental.
What I tried:
I tried to somehow deal with this for month now. Even if our app does something wrong this is definately a driver issue, isn’t it? Even if we leak some resources the driver should do cleanup when the application exits right? I checked for leaking OpenGL resources in our app using gDebugger but it didn’t find anything. The memory of the app itself is not increasing that much, too.
Do you have any suggestions what I can do to to find the source of the problem? I guess our application must do something different or otherwise a lot more people would have complained about this. Is there any way to get more information from the driver to know what’s actually leaking? Even if I was able to make a repro case it seems like it is not possible to submit a bug to nvidia anymore. Some years before I was a registered developer but now my account seems to be deleted and all my attempts to register again seem to be ignored.
I hope this is not the wrong forum but I don’t know where else to post. This really becomes big problem for us now and I’m getting desperate. Thanks for your time.