eodeo 11 January 2010 08:22 PM

Well, there are 4 computers at my Academy and 12 at university that I work at. I personaly used multiple machines since Max 9/vista initially came out, in both quadro/geforce/ati radeon graphic cards. One thing is constant vista/7 = max user UI graphical glitch [along with (if dx10 capability=true, GPU speed= 10%) along with many other problems, I’m just not willing to repeat].

I have yet to see one max that works correctly. I would love to see a video of a user using (any) Max in a way i described above (meaning vista/7 with dx10 capable graphic card) that DOESNT experience this error.

let’s stick to the machine you are on now that has the problems stated above. can you give us the details of this config? and please email me your email address used in the CER reports, i will pull them and see if there’s anything obvious to help you with.

crashing without a CER popup usually implies a system level driver failure so far under our code that we don’t catch it. these are very unique crashes and with a few helpful tips usually can be solved with a bit of a reconfig of the system. But i need the data first to point you off in the right direction.

Shane Griffith
Product Manager - 3ds Max & 3ds Max Design
Media and Entertainment Division
Autodesk, Inc.
AREA Blog
Twitter

Adriano, you wrote “i’ve looked into it and somehow concluded that the 500 euros GTX 295 card in my machine is just not working with max under Xp64”

You’ve found one of your problems. The GTX295 is a big problem in XP64. I’ve also got one, and I could only work without constant crashes and freezing up by turning off one of the GPUs in the hardware manager. After that I had no problems at all.

If you can, switch to Windows 7. The GTX 295 in Windows 7 is really really nice to work with. I’ve had no crashes, both GPUs work properly, and two monitors isn’t a problem like it was in XP64.

Hope this helps,

Dave

MAX Plugins.de - the database for 3ds max plugins

let’s stick to the machine you are on now that has the problems stated above.

I exaggerated. While I do have access to all these computers with Max, most have XP installed and/or non dx10 GPU paired with Vista, if using Vista.

Meaning they dont exhibit the problems or rather cant on account not having Vista/DX10 card in them.

can you give us the details of this config?

The very first system I experienced it on was Vista 64/Max 9 system with core2 quad 6600 @ 2.4 ghz, 8 gb ram, 8800gtx, asus highend P35 motherboard (not sure about exact model) - using all the latest drivers at the time. No updates or Max 2008 ever fixed this. XP64 did.

Second one was Vista 64/Max 2009 system with core2 quad 6600 @ 3.0 ghz (oc), 4gb ram, ati 4850 512mb, asus P5Q (vanilla) motherboard that I have been using since October 2008.

Eventually switching to Win7 64/ Max 2010 made little difference between them.

crashing without a CER popup usually implies a system level driver failure so far under our code that we don’t catch it.

Although from my posts one may conclude these are everyday occurrence for me, while this is not the case. Max usually crashes in an orderly fashion. It rarely crashed after creating a sphere. In fact, I believe that when I took the snap it was the 1st time it did it so fast. Than again, I never try to close Max after creating just one sphere.
My models are way more complex than that. I usually make another one ;)

p.s. some right clicks show menus properly some of the time.

EoDEo

Ideas drift like petals on the wind. You have only to lift your face to the breeze.

David Baker 12 January 2010 04:43 AM

Adriano, you wrote “i’ve looked into it and somehow concluded that the 500 euros GTX 295 card in my machine is just not working with max under Xp64”

You’ve found one of your problems. The GTX295 is a big problem in XP64. I’ve also got one, and I could only work without constant crashes and freezing up by turning off one of the GPUs in the hardware manager. After that I had no problems at all.

If you can, switch to Windows 7. The GTX 295 in Windows 7 is really really nice to work with. I’ve had no crashes, both GPUs work properly, and two monitors isn’t a problem like it was in XP64.

Hope this helps,

Dave

Yep, we have the same problem here with our GTX 295’s.  4 machines with xp64, all have 1 GPU disabled just so we can use 2 monitors (and stop having random crashes).  We did a bit more research recently and it’s even on nvidia’s sli zone site.  We have been given a windows 7 box of the same configuration in order to build a case for at least our group to get upgraded prior to the rest of the company.

http://www.slizone.com/object/sli_multi_monitor.html

This should be a dead giveaway:
System requirements
> Microsoft® Windows® Vista 32-bit or 64-bit (they even say 7 is supported in some of the FAQ’s, notice no mention of xp or xp64 for dual monitor support).
> NVIDIA GeForce 8 series and higher GPUs
> Two monitors supported, with both monitors plugged into the same GPU from an SLI group (see display configurations)

I know this isn’t exactly consistent with the original post, but there are a ton of complaints of viewport issues in general that really aren’t Max’s fault (drivers being the worst!  lol!).

Hope this helps someone!

At time of purchase of my GPU, ati radeon 4850, there wasnt a better card on the market, with the exception of 4870 that added 10-20% more speed at 50%-100% more $.

With the possibility of blaming it on poor ati cards and bad drivers, I had the “poor” nvidia card 8800gtx, that was the king of the hill at time of that purchase, barring none.

Regardless of ati/nvidia the problem is persistent. I have to admit that I haven’t seen a quadro dx10 capable in action, but I sincerely doubt that it would help. Then again Im basing that on nothing but speculation, and extrapolation of quadro cards I do have knowledge of.

GTX295 is a SLI on a card and anyone with any hardware knowledge of Max and any other professional program that isnt a game, would know this is bound to cause problems. SLI/crossfire always sucked and they have continued to do so since their original design dating as much as 10 years now. I dont expect that to change any time soon either.

Anyway, I have access to 2 very powerful dx10 cards from both ati/nvida camps and problem is persistent. Problem wasnt solved with driver updates, or an OS update (vista to 7), so I have to assume its Max’ fault. Or rather the way it interacts with the new OSs, since using XP fixes everything. Also, I’m not about to waste 2k $ getting an outdated, overpriced quadro card just to make sure it doesn’t work even on the expensive stuff.

All newer ati cards share the same drivers. Same is for nvidia. I would imagine that ANY nvida gf 8+ card and ANY ati 2k+ series card is having same driver/os/max problems.

EoDEo

Ideas drift like petals on the wind. You have only to lift your face to the breeze.

eodeo,

It sounds like others have already answered the graphics concerns that were brought up, so I will focus on just the CER data that I see. Now I’m not a developer so my analysis isn’t going to be too terribly qualified or detailed but I did notice a couple things I wanted to point out that may help you.

CERs in our database are grouped into what we call buckets of similar data. These days it’s rare to see a bucket represent more than 2% of the total CERs on that build of 3ds Max. I don’t have the data to tell me where yours were at in this list but most often a bucket represents a fraction of a percent of the total and when we see a big one pop up we fix it with a public hotfix or SP.

I see you have been submitting CERs since Max 9 so thank you for continuing to help make the product better. Out of all the reports you have sent us under that email address I show 37% of the buckets(groupings of CERs)being fixed. Now that doesn’t factor in the number of submissions per bucket which is likely to increase the percentage as we tend to focus on the larger buckets first.

All of your CERs for 2010 were grouped into 10 reports and 5 of which crashed at a point where data was able to be sent. The other 5 buckets (the ones with the most CERs from you) seem to be crashing around the same load levels in your page file usage. Again not a programmer here just found that to be odd and possibly linked to a fragmented page file allocation. All 5 of these appeared to have also occurred when you switched from Vista to Win7. Although Win7 is not officially supported on the 2010 release, I also noticed that only 3 other users have sent us CER data on 3ds Max 2010 that matches yours.

The point here is that hopefully you can see we take this data very seriously and with the frequent hotfixes and service packs have been very responsive to the issues that have been reported the most. As the Product Manager of the product I obviously can’t dive this deep into everyone’s data but we do have a strong team of very competent developers scouring this data on a daily basis and when common themes occur across several users we have been very quick to act on those issues.

Shane Griffith
Product Manager - 3ds Max & 3ds Max Design
Media and Entertainment Division
Autodesk, Inc.
AREA Blog
Twitter

Dont get me wrong. Max is the BEST. It always has been and I hope it stays that way. Any criticism I spread about Max is right here, where I know it will be used to make it even better.

I wish I could do more to help…

EoDEo

Ideas drift like petals on the wind. You have only to lift your face to the breeze.

eodeo 12 January 2010 02:49 PM

I wish I could do more to help…

keep clicking send on that CER button :) I was really impressed with the activity I did see from you.

Shane Griffith
Product Manager - 3ds Max & 3ds Max Design
Media and Entertainment Division
Autodesk, Inc.
AREA Blog
Twitter

will do :)

EoDEo

Ideas drift like petals on the wind. You have only to lift your face to the breeze.

Thank you, Shane, for coming all the way down to this thread to ignore the complaints of a commercial user to remind an educational user (am i assuming wrong EoDeo?) to numbly keep submitting CERs and pray for things to get better… haven’t we done that long enough so far.

So i’m not sure about the diplomatic reason of your presence here, but to me it feels a bit as a slap in my face… as in… “keep complaining, nobody cares!” Especially since your post’s count tells me that you don’t really spend too much time on this forum…

now to read that you’re really impressed by EoDeo’s activity??!! kinda worries me ever more… shouldn’t you be ALARMED by so much activity? aren’t we talking abotu CERs? is “keep sneding these reports” good enough to encourage EoDeo to ever buy a license? or even to keep me paying for a subscription? ...let me answer to that last one for myself… NO. I’ve been submitting Reports for years, posting around forums issues and solutions for just as long.... i never ever received any direct support from Autodeks, nor did my resaller when i was harrassing him on the phone to figure out solutions to help the production of the companies i was working for back then...or the one i’m running now. And now, you come here in the thread i started, ignore my posts .... and remind us to keep submitting CERs???!!! you really gotta be kiddin me…

I see you’re now at the head of the Strategy… here is a suggestion… how about… for teh first time of Autodesk’s history, you guys try to release… a bug free software!! ...instead of the usual buggy beta that you guys need to sale to do a good quarter? ...not sure how that soudns to you, but to me, taht sounds like progress… improvement… change!

pe@ce,

A

Adriano Zanetti
Owner@CraQue