Hi everyone,

I've just recently discovered this absolute gem of a modeler - truly excellent work on this "little" program. I'm thoroughly enjoying the trial version for the time being.

I have a slight issue though getting it to work with my ATI 3850 on one of my machines. On the other, older one, I have an nVidia 6800GT which works flawlessly. Both machines run XP. With the ATI-using one as soon as I click on any viewport and attempt any sort of operation the VGA stops sending anything to the monitor - I have to standby and resume my computer to get the drivers to reset and even after that any d3d app I try to use won't start and I have to reboot. On the same machine I use both Blender and SolidWorks for extended periods of time without any issues at all. I looked through the event log and, typically, nothing was logged and of course I have no crash dumps to share either. Just for reference, I got the 10.2 driver version (10.3 was released a few days ago).

Any ideas what I may check? I've set all the d3d options to application-controlled and went through the moi.ini trying to find any sort of graphic settings but nothing seemed to help.

Hi xaotik, that's definitely going to be some problem in your video drivers.

I'd recommend updating to the latest version, that will probably solve it. If it doesn't you may need to instead go to a slightly older one instead.


> On the same machine I use both Blender and SolidWorks for
> extended periods of time without any issues at all.

Those apps both use OpenGL instead of Direct3D, so they actually use a completely different driver infrastructure than what MoI ends up using.

So whatever driver problem you currently have seems to be in the Direct3D area. Most of the time it is the other way around (with the OpenGL drivers being more flaky especially with ATI), but not for your case here it seems.


> Any ideas what I may check?

Nothing really... It just really sounds like there is a bug in the video drivers that gets exercised by the particular combination of drawing commands that MoI happens to send to the card.

Your best bet is to update to the latest drivers, there is a good chance that will solve it for you.

- Michael

Also if you are overclocking the card or the CPU or something you might want to back off that and see if it improves things. Sometimes that can produce weird effects.

I did a quick google search for "ATI 3850 crash" and see a lot of stuff... Hopefully a driver update will solve it for you though.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the feedback. I had in mind to install the latest driver version anyhow and the symptoms surely do point that way since my DirectX installation is up to date and dxdiag doesn't show anything out of the ordinary. I'll let you know if this solves it. From stuff that definitely runs in d3d mode the only other thing I've tried on this machine are some recent fancy simulator games and I didn't notice anything out of the ordinary.

> Also if you are overclocking the card or the CPU or something you might want to back off that and see if it improves things.
> Sometimes that can produce weird effects.

Nah, I haven't overclocked this at all and it's well cooled, getting at most up to 35C.

> I did a quick google search for "ATI 3850 crash" and see a lot of stuff...

Yeah, it's to be expected you'd find a lot of stuff - it was marketed as a budget gaming card really so there will be a lot of gamers out there with crashes. However, as I said this isn't a typical crash - the machine is responsive, just the VGA bugs out and there's no logging of it anywhere, nothing spits out an error, no blue screen, nothing - if I set the machine to standby and then resume it returns to rendering normally, MoI is still there, until I try to manipulate anything in MoI. Is there some sort of verbose debug logging mode I can enable in MoI?

Hi xaotik,

> Is there some sort of verbose debug logging mode
> I can enable in MoI?

There isn't any special extra-logging mode, but there is a regular log that you could check out. Hold down the Ctrl key and click in the "MoI" title text in the upper right area of the main window to get the debug menu, and pick "Show log" off of that.

Errors reported back from Direct3D are pretty heavily logged.


But it kind of sounds like some kind of internal state in the driver itself is getting messed up, that may not trickle up to a normal error message back to a client program like MoI, but it is worth a check.

- Michael

Just a note. be sure that "Hardware acceleration" is not turned down at all.

As an update on the subject - it seems that the latest Catalyst drivers (10.3) fixed it. To validate this, I re-installed 10.2 and tried again and indeed there is something (which isn't directly mentioned in the release notes of the 10.3 fixes) that causes the same problem to occur, so 10.3 it is.

Thanks again for your time!

Hi xaotik, that's great news that the updated driver has fixed the problem!

Video cards these days tend to be the most complex thing in your machine, and the video drivers are a set of complex software as well. Complexity tends to breed bugs so that's why it's not too unusual to run into bugs in video drivers more often than in other kinds of drivers.

- Michael