HD 6990 - Possible OpenGL memory leak?

Hi guys,

I’ve been searching for some sort of solution to a problem I have been having.

All OpenGL games will crash after a very precise amount of time when recording with DxTory or Fraps (probably any recording software). The games run fine when NOT recording. The length of recording that can take place before the game stops responding also depends on the resolutions. Also note that I can record DirectX games perfectly fine for hours and hours

For example, the game will stop responding after about 8mins at 1920x1080, and will record for around 18mins at 1280x720p.

I have 3 OpenGL games currently and they are: Doom 3, Amnesia & Minecraft. They all do the exact same thing after the exact same amount of time depending on resolution. Although because minecraft is graphically much less demanding, the process of the crash is much slower, so you can physically see the FPS slowly dropping until it reaches about 9 fps, then it will freeze. During this time the fan speeds increase.

There isn’t much I haven’t tried to solve this myself. I have tried all sorts of screen resolutions, windowed mode, running the game on a single GPU, different drivers, reformatting, reinstalling, setting CPU priorities and affinities so they don’t use the same cores, running in xp compatibility mode… there isn’t much I haven’t tried…

It is getting ridiculous to say the least.

I would love to find out what is causing the memory leak. If there is a good way to pin point the problem please let me know and I will do my best to find it!

Kind regards,

Remag

How many displays do you have? Try having the task manager running and GPU-Z running while recording (if you have 2 you can have them on the secondary display). Use Window mode if you have one monitor, you’re going to need to observe memory usage of both your CPU and GPU.

Make sure your task manager can observe the memory of individual processes. View --> Select Columns --> Memory (physical or -Private Working Set.) This way you can find out which application is causing the memory leak.

Right! So I did what you suggested. It shows the “Memory Usage (Dedicated)” slowly increasing during recording, until it reaches 502 MB and the game freezes. When running the game without recording, the “Memory Usage (Dedicated) [MB]” remains at 240mb constant.

Looking at the application processes and memory usage there, DxTory (the recording software) was not increasing in memory usage, it seemed to be stable. The only thing that was increasing steadily with memory usage was the Steam application, which is required to be active in order to run the game.

So from that it looks like a driver problem. Does AMD read this forum? If so please fix this because I’ve spent so much time trying to fix this that it is easy to consider going to an Nvidia card to avoid this in the future.

Thanks

AMD/ATI historically has less than desirable OpenGL drivers. If you are running the latest catalyst drivers then this driver bug could be related to the Windows XP distribution of the catalyst drivers.

Your best bet is to directly report the bug on the AMD Website. Chances of this bug getting fixed is much higher on the website itself rather than a general OpenGL Board (pertaining to all implementations of OpenGL, whether it be NVIDIA, ATI, AMD, Intel, Apple, Mesa, etc.)

Thanks NeighborhoodCroak.

I did send them a bug report previously but I have sent another one now, with a bit more information. Hopefully they will come back to me, letting me know that they have found the source of the problem. I was hoping some people at AMD may read these forums as well.

Fingers crossed! Cheers for the help on the matter!