How to restart video without restarting the machine ?
Frequently, an app I'm using is screwing up the video ram on my GeForce 4 MX card, and I need to restart the machine to clean it up. Is there a way under Panther to clean ALL the video ram without restarting the machine ? Logg out and loggin again doesn't make the trick. I need a way to reset the video memory without restarting. Do you have an idea ?
Comments
I've never seen a case where someone has had to clear the video card's memory like that. Bizarre.
Originally posted by Brad
Could you provide details for this? What app is doing this?
I've never seen a case where someone has had to clear the video card's memory like that. Bizarre.
it's probably porn or something. otherwise he would say it
Actually, the app is Celestia, a free astronomy program which relies heavily on 3D and GL. There are lots of huge textures, real time bumpmaps etc. I can put my 32 MB video card on its knees with it. From times to times, Celestia is running out of video ram and the pictures get screwed. Quiting the software and relaunch it again isn't enough. The only solution I've found in this case is restarting the machine. Take note : nothing crashed actually. Just the card with corrupted memory.
I fear you might have a broken card, since I used to play online games for a top 10 team in Europe, and the GeForce Ti4600 in my wintel box has 128 Mb of ram and got well and truly thrashed and never so much as put a pixel wrong.
The latest nVidia offerings might not be "all that", but I feel they were at a high point with the geforce 4 range, and you might be suffering some sort of hardware problem.
Originally posted by Gargoyle
WOW, you really make your 32Mb card suffer with an app that uses lots of textures?!?!?! Shocking. See the surprise --->
Was that really necessary?
Anyhow, I have a 32 MB card too and I've never seen anything like this. I've only used Celestia a few times, but I've played plenty of high-textured games without a glitch (aside from it being a little slow).
Is there anything specific that you can recall happening or you doing in Celestia when this happens? Is it reproducible (ie. so I can try myself)?
On a related note, how much RAM do you have in your Mac? Quartz Extreme shares your RAM with the AGP card. I'm wondering if there could be anything strange related to that here.
A single 2048 x 1024 32 bit texture = 8 MB of video memory. When you have several of these showing at the same time on the screen, 32 MB video ram may not be enough.
I have a 1 GB memory dual machine with Panther. I don't think I have any hardware issue.
ATI now have drivers ( for the PC ) that detect when the card has crashed and reset. It often kills the software ( game ) that was running, but at least allows the machine as a whole to keep going.
On the PC side this sort of thing is often associated with overclocking, although, as I say, driver and software bugs can also do it.
It should be possible to clean up the card. Im guessing Celestia is just writing textures to the wrong place, so you should be able to clean up the vram as well. Unfortunately, Aqua might assume that VRAM doesnt get corrupted.
One day Apple might do something like ATI have done, but untill then I would bug the Celestia developers, it is probably their issue.