3DC 9.1.1. crashes frequently unders Windows 7 64-bit

I use 3DC9 on a Vista 32-bit laptop and also on a 64-bit Windows 7 PC. On the laptop I can be working for hours without a problem, but on the PC, the program crashes every 10 minutes or so. I still prefer to use the PC because it’s faster and the screen is much bigger. The symptoms of the crash are that it seems to fail to refresh the control panes (the ones with the tabs and command icons). Sometimes the panes get shaded out with the cross-hatching pattern. Sometimes, a few seconds before the panes crash, the programme stops responding to clicks on the command buttons.
The programme is always able to recover the model at the exact point I was doing before the crash, regardless of when I did the last save, so it’s not causing me to lose any work.
I did think this bug was limited to my Windows 7 PC, but last night, after working on a model for some hours, it crashed on the laptop too.
My guess is that it could be a memory leak problem.

• This topic was modified 11 years, 10 months ago by Spudinsky.
• This topic was modified 11 years, 10 months ago by Spudinsky.

My initial reaction to this is: You can go for hours on your laptop without a crash? 🙂

Seriously, it makes me happy that you can work so long without a crash.

I agree that it is likely a memory leak. I’ve put countless hours into finding and correcting memory leaks. It’s actually supposed to be “automatic” with the language I use, but because of circular references (necessary) it isn’t.

I’m curious about the graphics card in your desktop vs laptop. I don’t want to blame “drivers”, but I’m very curious.

The strange thing about the laptop is that it sometimes pauses when refreshing the panes, which looks very, very similar to how it looks on the PC when it’s just about to crash, but on the laptop it appears to struggle through and carry on after a pause of a second or so.

The system specs are:

Laptop
———
HP Pavilion dv6 Notebook PC
AMD Turion X2 Dual-Core Mobile RM-74
4GB RAM
Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit with SP2
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4500/5100 series with ATI driver 8.801.0.0

PC
—-

Alienware ALX 58
Intel 3.86MHz i7-975
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, all the updates
12GB DDR3 RAM
Dual nVidia GTX 295 (so, four GPUs in SLI) with the very latest drivers from nVidia

Interesting that the one that works well is ATI and the one that doesn’t is NVIDIA. I do most of my development on ATI. But, honestly I doubt that is it.

There is a difference between how 3DCrafter works on ATI vs NVIDIA. There’s a but on ATI that means that I have to do things slightly differently. Maybe I should produce a version that uses ONLY the ATI methods. It makes 3DC slower, but maybe it will make a difference in reliability on NVIDIA. I’ll have to look into it.

I don’t know, but when it crashes, it seems to be in the panes with all the buttons, not in the ones that render the model itself. It’s as if on the PC, it gets stuck when refreshing those panes. I’ve seen it crash when I iconize the programme (send it to the taskbar) and bring it back up on screen …. it struggles to redraw the buttons panes.

By the way, at first I thought it could be running out of memory because of not compressing the model, but now I do a “compress all” very often (and save often), but it can still crash shortly after doing a compress, so I don’t think that makes any difference.