Hi All,

I have my scene set up the way I want and I have setup a Mantra node to render it out, however, the amount of time required is fairly long. This causes Houdini to crash the nVidia driver.

This happens every time I walk away from the computer.
When I come back Houdini Apprentice has crashed and there is a nVidia recovery message.

How do I configure my computer so Houdini will not crash? This is basically a clean Window 7 64bit build with screen saver set to None and the power settings set to High Performance. So the only thing that ever turns off is simply the screen.

Was the “High Performance” setting enough to prevent different parts of the computer from turning off or sleeping? Maybe some things are still being turned off? There seems to be advanced settings for finer-grain control. What about disabling the screensaver?

If the graphics driver is somehow crashing Houdini, maybe you can try using hbatch to do your render. That should avoid any problems related to graphics driver.

I think I have figured it out. It is the dreaded nVidia TDR delay error.

I followed the directions at this link [forums.geforce.com] and it seems to be a solution for Houdini as well.

The default timeout seems to be seven seconds. This means that if the OpenGL ROP takes longer than 7 seconds per-frame to complete it's task it crashes the driver which then crashes Houdini and then the driver recovers.

I set my time out for both values to 20 seconds and the same scene that was previously crashing is proceeding without crashing.

I do see OpenCL Exception: clEnqueueNDRangeKernal (-4) stacking up in the console, however.

Maybe the Windows Houdini Installer could be modified to check these timeout values and extend them if needed?

Dang, I guess I spoke too soon.

I am still getting crashes on Window 7 64 bit using nVdia drivers while rendering using the OpenGL ROP.

I wonder if the timeout value isn't high enough… From here, it seems like you be able to disable the check completely using the TdrLevel key.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/Library/Windows/Hardware/ff569918%28v=vs.85%29.aspx [msdn.microsoft.com]

It'd also be good to send your scene to our tech support, so that we can see if we can actually do something about these timeout.

I sent in the test scene as suggested and also tried disabling the timeout all together.

That does indeed work and allowed Houdini to complete the OpenGL render without crashing.

If you don't have a registry key, create the key for TdrLevel and set it to zero.

Im having a similar issue, making the HKEY change helped, but its not really a ‘fix’

I can recreate the crash by importing a large alembic file, and using a blast node to remove a large piece of it.

the update / refresh in the viewport is just long enough to crash on anything under 8 seconds.


Windows 10, latest build
Nvidia GTX 980 ti latest driver
houdini 14.0474 and previous

Did you try setting TdrLevel to Zero? I have disabled TDR and have not had a crash since. But I don't use Alembic yet.

I'm working with Alembic files and am constantly getting TDR crashes - and it doesn't just crash the houdini session I'm running - it crashes ALL houdini sessions I'm running.

I've tried setting the TDR delay higher to no avail.

It usually happens to me when I'm trying to tumble my view around in the viewport.

This appears to be a problem with the Alembic node in houdini and some sort of redrawing problem in the viewport.

Hm, I wonder if this is a driver issue. Have you tried updating your graphics card driver? What does the crash screen look like? Were there any errors/messages?

has anyone solved this problem at Houdini?

I get the same issue with my AMD in Windows 10 and the latest video drivers. I looked for the registry entries and found nothing for those entries, but this should not be a solution for the end user to be doing.

This really seems like an issue on the SideFX side. Like the others here, I use many other apps from the competition and have never faced this issue. I get the crash 100% of the time while trying to navigate around the scene view (main viewport). It normally only takes a few seconds of tumbling to cause the crash.

Does your system meet the minimum specs of 2GB of vRam?

Enivob
Does your system meet the minimum specs of 2GB of vRam?

yeah, it does. It's also one of the supported cards. amd 7870.

I have solved my issue by installing the latest graphic driver [thegeekpage.com].