Friday, December 21, 2007

NVidia: 2 Ben: 0

I found the root cause of another NVidia specific bug, and once again it's my own stupid code. If you Google for driver bugs, you'll find plenty of grumpy developers ranting about how card X does this wrong thing and card Y does that wrong thing...I figure it's only fair to follow up and say "yep, that one was mine."

Like the previous nVidia-only crash, this was a case where X-Plane was always doing something wrong, but only some drivers had problems with the behavior. So the crash was NVidia-specific, but X-Plane caused.

I believe that this bug was manfiesting itself either as a message that "scenery shift took more than 30 seconds" or some kind of crash. One of the problems was that the diagnostics for this particular bit of code were really bad. So we've improved things a bunch...
  • There is more careful error checking during scenery shift, and those error messages are reported.
  • If the sim does crash, some new code will output a crash log on Windows that helps us isolate what actually happened.
Beta 12 will be out soon with the fix that caused problems on NV hardware as well as the improved diagnostics. So you may find that the sim just works better, but if it does still crash or report errors, please tell us - now we'll have log files that will let us diagnose the problem a lot faster!

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