We have a handful of users reporting crashes on Windows using NVidia drivers.  So please email me (ben at x-plane dot com) if you meet all of these requirements:

  1. You have an NVidia graphics card.
  2. You are running Windows 7.
  3. You are running X-Plane 10.10r3.
  4. You are running the latest (306.23 WHQL) drivers.
  5. X-Plane crashes in a reproducible way (e.g. every time you turn up shadows, crash).

I am looking to collect more in depth crash information to figure out what is going on.  Sadly Chris and I both have NV-Windows boxes in our offices and both are stable.

About Ben Supnik

Ben is a software engineer who works on X-Plane; he spends most of his days drinking coffee and swearing at the computer -- sometimes at the same time.

20 comments on “NVidia Crash? I need a few volunteers”

  1. Just FYI, 306.23 is WHQL.. And there doesn’t seem to be any official releases on the NVIDIA site for newer versions…

  2. Funny this gets posted today. I just had a bad bout with xpx yesterday which led to several crash report being sent. For now I would like to think my issues were not nivida related. However I am very confused at zeroing in on performance related issues. With 10.10r3 and frede custom scenery down south, anytime I went to any of his airports, I crashed. I think I solved that with updating opensceneryx, but I had issues with FPS sucking really bad. Last time I had this issue, it turned out to be Joan’s NOAA plugin, wasnt the case this time with any plugins. Being that I did not want to mess with any of my settings, I started back tracking settings. As you stated, cars were hurting fps bad, trees nothing, making the rez smaller, nothing. So I went in and did the old nuking of prefs and worked my way back up. I am now running the same settings I had prior to installing r3 with similar to better frame rates(which is great). I will do more testing, but it also seems I get better fps with HDR on at night.

    Questions. What is going on when prefs are deleted? Is there some hidden voodoo that gets cleared out? I take it custom scenery can crash the whole sim?

    Prior to nuking my prefs, I did remove all plugins and custom scenery before messing with graphics settings( because they were working fine before). I also loaded simple planes(gliders) to make sure the good ole 757 wasnt the problem. It seemed all of this was cleared up as soon as I deleted all prefs? Do you recommend nuking to be the first step after an upgrade?
    More to ask you about the log file in the future, work calls me now!

    Thanks keep up the good work!

    1. For the record:

      >What is going on when prefs are deleted?

      We re-build the prefs with factory defaults.

      >Is there some hidden voodoo that gets cleared out?

      No. But we don’t get good bug reporting because when users have “mystery behavior with evil prefs” they always delete the prefs instead of saving the prefs and sending them to us for analysis. I’ve blogged about this before — if we don’t get the ‘bad prefs’ then to us this is all heresay and not real bug reports.

      >I take it custom scenery can crash the whole sim?

      Yes. There can be some defects in custom scenery that the sim will _not_ catch and provide an error message too – the sim often prioritizes perf over safety.

      > It seemed all of this was cleared up as soon as I deleted all prefs?

      Since you DELETED the prefs we’ll never know what was going on – but reading your first paragraph, it’s sort of a disorganized pile of chaos with multiple symptoms and multiple add-ons. These things can only be figured out systematically. That’s why we always say “remove your add-ons” — not because we don’t want you to use add-ons, but because we want to divide and conquer until we find the problem, adding back one add-on at a time.

      > Do you recommend nuking to be the first step after an upgrade?

      No. If you have working prefs that crash after an upgrade, file a bug, include the ‘toxic’ prefs in a zip file.

      cheers
      ben

  3. Pingback: NVidia Crash? X-Plane Dev Ben Supnik needs a few volunteers | Aerosoft Sim News

  4. This issue is also valid on Linux ans NVidia drivers. Although the version is not the same (lower on linux).
    If you have no objection to test it on Linux OS too, then I be happy to help.

    btw, I had the same issue on Windows and it happned after switching to a newer NVidia card. The only solution I found was to re-install the OS (Ouch I know), but now Shadows works fine on my Windows.

    Cheers

  5. I’m using Nvidia gts250 which 306.23 driver in a computer core i5 processor with 4 GB Ram DDR3 and X-plane run perfectly, so I don’t have problems.

    Bye.

  6. 560 gtx windows 7 64 RC3 Newest drivers from Nvidia

    No Problems. I tried to make it crash for 2 hrs by switching shadows settings over and over.

    The only issue I have is with HDR on, Night is too dark. I did send a bug report about that.

  7. not only nvidia drivers:
    win7 64 amd hd6870 catalyst 12.9 clean new installation 10.10r3
    lot of crash, always on startup.
    do you need volunteer for this bug ?

    1. Hi ben

      I found the problem (win7 64 amd hd6870 catalyst 12.9 clean new installation 10.10r3 crash always on startup).

      The problem is driver ppjoy 0.8.4.5 with (vjoy active) for win64.
      If I disable this driver the crash on startup disappear….

      Best Regards

      Roberto

  9. I thought it was in my head. I meet all that criteria. My NVidia card is a 690. I find that whenever I turn on HDR it crashes. So, I’ve been flying without HDR and it has been fine. I can twiddle all the other settings all day long and nothing breaks. But if I turn on HDR (well HDR and twiddle the extra settings that HDR enables), that’s where I get failure. So I just leave it off and twiddle everything else.

  10. there are two driver used by cokpit builders to interface axis and button like hid interface ( virtual joystick ).
    ppjoy is an older interace, vjoy is the “new” driver. they expose some api’s for
    virtual joysticks and i/o .
    ppjoy and vjoy work perfectly with xp 9 and 10.05 ( and all simulators in windws…).
    with xp 10.10 crash on startup.

Comments are closed.