Strange behavior on Mac Pro + Nvidia 7300GT
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SamSam Apogee
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Join date: 24 May 2006
Posts: 23
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09-09-2006 14:27
From: Brent Linden One question: is the client actually crashing and are crash logs being sent? Brent, On my config (below), the client freezes after 30-40 minutes, requiring a force-quit. On the subsequent launch, it requests a crash report and I have sent one every single time (over a dozen times). Also, to recap, I'm having the same graphics glitches as zorin and my system is now working perfectly when I use Zorin's workaround. SamSam My config: OS: 10.4.7 Build: 8J135 CPU: G5 1.8GHz Ram: 1.25 GB Video- Chipset Model: GeForce FX 5200 Type: Display Bus: AGP Slot: AGP VRAM (Total): 64 MB Vendor: nVIDIA (0x10de) Device ID: 0x0321 Revision ID: 0x00b1 ROM Revision: 2060 Network: 7 megabit cable
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Leah Salome
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Join date: 13 Jul 2005
Posts: 59
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09-09-2006 23:02
Beth, I have 8k1124 and i have the problems.
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SamSam Apogee
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Join date: 24 May 2006
Posts: 23
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09-13-2006 12:27
Things have gotten pretty quiet here. What happened? Have we given up pursuing a fix since Zorin posted his workaround?
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Zorin Frobozz
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Join date: 21 Mar 2006
Posts: 84
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09-14-2006 05:34
From: SamSam Apogee Things have gotten pretty quiet here. What happened? Have we given up pursuing a fix since Zorin posted his workaround? The problem is still there. I noticed that the 2048x2048 textures are gone with the latest update and are now loading as 1024x1024 -- I'm still seeing 2048x1024 textures, though. This has resulted in a notable improvement, but if I don't run SL inside the Profiler I still get the lockups. I suspect this is definitely an Nvidia driver bug and has not much to do with SL itself. -Z
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SamSam Apogee
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Join date: 24 May 2006
Posts: 23
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09-14-2006 07:45
From: Zorin Frobozz I suspect this is definitely an Nvidia driver bug and has not much to do with SL itself. That would make the most sense, but then why is SL the only app causing these problems....?
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Printer2169 Goheen
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Join date: 30 Aug 2006
Posts: 1
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09-14-2006 08:55
Greetings I too have a Mac Pro and the 7300 card and I have the lockups and such. I just downloaded Blender (3d application) and it is compleetly unusable with the Mac Pro and the 7300 card the screen goes all pixilated when you open the program, so I think there is a problem somewhere in the Apple Drivers. Other games and apps work fine.
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Bethanee Heaney
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Join date: 22 Dec 2005
Posts: 103
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09-15-2006 10:59
It -is- apple's drivers.
I just got a replacement for my machine (it turned out to be defective), and I had a 7300GT in there. I ran SL and.. .boom .. instant Kernel Panic.
Then I received the X1900 card in the mail to add into the machine. (They had none in the store).
I put it in.
I ran Rember and did all the things that would cause SL to Kernel Panic. I ran SL. Nothing... no problems, no crashes. (Plus, wow is that X1900 card fast! Frame rates went way up.)
And this is with 4GB of RAM.
I was never, ever able to get SL to run before on any machine with a 7300GT without lowering my RAM to 2GB. Even then, the game paused and had all kinds of other issues.
Under the X1900, I have no such issues.
Linden, et al: it is the Nvidia drivers and/or card.
Earlier, posted this:
"1) An SL problem 2) A problem with the PAE mode used only on the Mac Pros 3) A problem with the 7300GT card (ATI's seem fine?) 4) A problem with the OS build included on earlier shipments of the Mac Pro. I have 8K1079.. to quote from Macintouch:"
Well, it isn't #1 I don't think.
Nor is it #2 (I have 4GB in with no problems).
It is definitely #3 (see above).
And it isn't #4 (I have the same build on my new machine.)
So there you go. =)
EDIT: Tonight while I played a long while I also imported some HD video, copied DVDs, and ran email, safari, iTunes, etc. I stressed the system pretty good.
SL crashed about 4 times in 4 hours with the old KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS errors I mentioned earlier. [Keep in mind this is an all new physical machine, all new hardware, new graphics card, etc.]
I played a good deal, so the crashes weren't that bad overall. The game stayed incredibly fast and smooth (when it is running I get no lockups or stutters), and I had no Kernel Panics. Nothing else was effected.
But there is still some instablity in the code which I didn't notice right off. It is much, MUCH better (dare I say pleasantly playable now?), but still has a little ways to go.
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SamSam Apogee
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Join date: 24 May 2006
Posts: 23
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09-16-2006 08:04
And I just wanted to remind folks that I'm having all of those texture problems and crashes on my system which is a G5 with a GeForce FX 5200. So it's not exclusively a problem with Mac Pros or 7300GTs
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Leah Salome
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Join date: 13 Jul 2005
Posts: 59
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09-18-2006 01:03
Beth, how did you go about getting a replacement? I want a replacement too. Do you have to send the Nividia one back first? Did you just pay the difference in price on the cards? Was Apple really helpfull?
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Bethanee Heaney
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Join date: 22 Dec 2005
Posts: 103
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09-18-2006 01:16
My machine had problems with the hard drives all failing.. that's why they took it back. It had nothing to do with the Nvidia card. It's just SL that has issues with it [the 7300].
The whole machine got swapped, not just the card, and when I got the replacement machine it had a 7300 in it too. That new machine, card also failed in SL. But this time the hard drives were all fine, of course.
I already had an X1900 card coming to replace the 7300 out. I paid for the upgrade kit separately. When I put it in, the SL problems went away for the most part.
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Maldavius Figtree
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Join date: 17 Aug 2006
Posts: 5
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09-18-2006 10:38
Im running a macbook pro 4GB and I have only had one problem... If the battery becomes too hot when SL is running the whole system softlocks *_- Ive never had any of the other problems that are posted here... >.> *Blames apple for you*
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Bethanee Heaney
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Join date: 22 Dec 2005
Posts: 103
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09-18-2006 12:07
From: Maldavius Figtree Im running a macbook pro 4GB and I have only had one problem... If the battery becomes too hot when SL is running the whole system softlocks *_- Ive never had any of the other problems that are posted here... >.> *Blames apple for you* MacBook Pros only go to 2GB of RAM. Do you mean Mac Pro?
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SamSam Apogee
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Join date: 24 May 2006
Posts: 23
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09-19-2006 18:42
Hrm. I just tried running SL without the profiler to see if the baking avatar fixes helped me out but no luck. After about 7 minutes random textures started corrupting. Oh well...back to the profiler.
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Beren Barragar
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Join date: 9 Jul 2006
Posts: 37
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openGL profiler
09-26-2006 09:32
Can anyone actually tell me where to get this OpenGL profiler? I can't find it on my install discs or by searching the Apple site. Anyone got a URL link? Or can you describe where it is on the install discs?
Thanks
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SamSam Apogee
Registered User
Join date: 24 May 2006
Posts: 23
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09-26-2006 09:58
From: Beren Barragar Can anyone actually tell me where to get this OpenGL profiler? I can't find it on my install discs or by searching the Apple site. Anyone got a URL link? Or can you describe where it is on the install discs? It's in the Developer's Kit as described in this post: /164/c4/131286/1.html#post1267831If you don't have the Developer CD, you can get it in the developer's section of Apple http://connect.apple.com(you have to sign up for free to get access) When you install it, you will find it in <drivename>..Developer..Applications..Graphics Tools Good luck! 
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Beren Barragar
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Join date: 9 Jul 2006
Posts: 37
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Still crashing even under OpenGL profiler
09-26-2006 10:01
Please ignore the request for info on OpenGL profiler. I found it. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to help in my case. I have brand new 24" iMac with 2GB RAM and the 256 Nvidia 7600 GT video card. Whenever I try to to run SL I get a kernal panic, sometimes almost immediately, othertimes after a few minutes. I tried the OpenGL profiler trick recommended here. But it still crashed. This time it let me force quit SL at least - and my hopes were up. But seconds later the whole OS crashed. So, if you're thinking of buying one of these macs to improve your Second Life experience, you might want to hold off. Looking through these posts I suspect it's either the Nvidia cards at fault or SL's ability to run on the Intel core 2 duo macs. (Mind you, my technical knowledge is worth squat)
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Beren Barragar
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Join date: 9 Jul 2006
Posts: 37
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Parallels have fixed their problem
09-27-2006 03:14
Several people on these message boards have pointed out the similarity of problems with Second Life and Parallels Desktop on the new Mac Pros and iMacs. It seems Parallels have fixed the problem with a new release. See: http://forum.parallels.com/thread4536.htmlI had the same problem with the standard version of Parallels - crashed my whole machine. BUt this new build fixed the problem. Unfortunately, I now discover that Parallels can't run SL, or any game requiring 3D graphics, apparently (might come in a later build). The PC version of SL refuses to load under Parallels Desktop. Still, if the original Parallels problem and the SL problems really are similar, then this shows a fix is possible. Over to you, Lindens... (I have a new 24" iMac, with Nvidia 256MB 7600GT card. SL crashes, taking the whole machine with it, requiring hardware reboot. It does this consistently, within minutes of opening the game).
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Jin Mfume
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Join date: 24 Jul 2005
Posts: 1
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09-28-2006 14:44
Just throwing my hat into the ring as a Mac Pro owner having these freezing issues as well on a 7300 card. No such issues with freezing under windows/boot camp, however the frame rate is absolutely terrible, 3-4fps. Yes, I have my sata drives running properly under windows after much messing around with slipstreamed xp install discs.
Under OSX, the frame rate is far, far higher, until of course SL freezes and requires a force quit, or occasionally a hard reset as it's taken the whole system with it. For me it always seems to be when I go to turn, or take a step forward. SL will stutter, and sometimes recover after a few seconds frozen, but most times it results in the spinning beachball of death, from which there is nothing left to do but kill sl.
Using the OpenGL profiler does not seem to help that much. Sure, it decreased the frequency of the freezes, but sl runs like molasses, and textures, especially the sky, seem to take forever to update.
Looks like I'll be ordering that x1900 sooner than I'd liked.
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Beren Barragar
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Join date: 9 Jul 2006
Posts: 37
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Crossover windows 'emulator'
09-29-2006 01:38
Further to my post about Parallels Desktop not running SL - I've been experimenting with ways to run SL without having to reboot into Boot Camp, considering the mac client simply won't work for me. There's a beta app called CrossOver, which allows macs to run Windows apps without even installing Windows. Sounds great. But will it work? Well, some games seem to work, and they seem to have a very active testing programme going. But no one seems to have tested SL. So I gave it a go. I installed CrossOver( www.codeweavers.com), and that went fine. Then I installed the Windows SL client (I'm running OS X here don't forget). I went through the installation - along with lots of warnings from CrossOver that this is an unsupported application. A few glitches but it seemed to work. I got SL to load. Horribly slow, but it worked. Crashed twice, after only a few minutes. I'll probably give up at this point, as I'm technically illiterate (and have lots of RL work to do too). But this could be a way forward as a way to run the Windows client on a mac. One day.
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Loki Eliot
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Join date: 21 Oct 2005
Posts: 98
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09-29-2006 06:03
From: For me it always seems to be when I go to turn, or take a step forward. SL will stutter, and sometimes recover after a few seconds frozen, but most times it results in the spinning beachball of death[/QUOTE
There was an SL update to the mac client that did this before! Linden fixed this, so i guess its just sit and be paitent again.
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Zorin Frobozz
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Join date: 21 Mar 2006
Posts: 84
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09-29-2006 15:51
I believe 10.4.8 fixed the problem. I'm running SL sans-profiler in Luskwood at the moment; have been in there for a while, the place is kind of busy and no lockups at all.
I'll let ya'll know if there's any further issues, but I think they nailed this one. Was definitely a driver bug, it seems.
-Z
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Zorin Frobozz
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Join date: 21 Mar 2006
Posts: 84
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09-29-2006 15:56
Hmm.. spoke too soon. Things are better, but not still quite fixed. I have serious performance problems in busy areas if my video RAM is set to 256MB. No lockups, but lousy framerates galore. If I set my video RAM to 128MB, all works well. I have a feeling there's a starvation issue in the video driver somewhere whne a lot of video RAM is being used.  At least I don't have to run it in profiler anymore, though. Just wish I could use all my video memory.
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Beren Barragar
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Join date: 9 Jul 2006
Posts: 37
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still crashing
09-30-2006 01:34
I've installed 10.4.8 and SL still crashes, taking the whole system with it. Whole screen goes weird. Now - it does this in Bootcamp as well. How weird is that?
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Zorin Frobozz
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Join date: 21 Mar 2006
Posts: 84
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09-30-2006 14:38
From: Beren Barragar I've installed 10.4.8 and SL still crashes, taking the whole system with it. Whole screen goes weird. Now - it does this in Bootcamp as well. How weird is that? Maybe it's hardware issues? SL has never crashed the entire sytem for me. I haven't installed Windows on my Mac Pro but at least under OSX it never crashed; just had freezing and texture corruption. What's your system configuration?
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Beren Barragar
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Join date: 9 Jul 2006
Posts: 37
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I think you're right, Zorin
09-30-2006 15:42
Zorin, yes - I'm now convinced that much if not all my problems are hardware - probably the graphics card or RAM. It just started showing up in SL because of the load it puts on the system. I have a one week old 24" iMac 2.16ghz, 2GB RAM and 256 NVIDIA 7600 GT graphics card. When SL is running, it looks great. But it crashes all the time. This has spread - and the system often refuses to reboot now. So it's going back. At least Apple were really good about it. There'll be a wait for a replacement, but there was no fuss. In fact, they were quite apologetic. I suppose I might have to apologise to some Lindens...
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