nVidia vs. WPF

July 23, 2007 @ 11:13 am- from Hood River, Oregon

As I've mentioned here in the past I still have major issues with my video drivers for my laptops nVidia GO 7800 GTX card. The biggest issue is that multi-monitor doesn't work at all, and well that the video driver crashes occasionally (better with more recent drivers).

However, as I've started to work a little more with WPF I'm unfortunately finding that WPF in particular is likely to crash the video driver. Starting up a an application that uses WPF is likely to crash especially if opacity and/or animation is involved. I'm curious if others are seeing similar issues with nVidia drivers crashing (black screen of death followed by driver recovery).

It's interesting though that WPF incurs the nVidia wrath - I've come to find applications that apparently use WPF like the Windows Picture Viewer because they are the most likely to crash when invoked. It's by no means consistent (ie. run this form and make the driver crash) but it's frequent enough that it's a real problem while doing any work with WPF code. Fuck! Given that the machine doesn't crash with kernel errors I assume that this problem is in the driver not with the hardware itself which is what I was starting to worry about.

These video problems are driving me nuts. I'm almost desperate enough to buy a new machine to get it over with <s>, but I'm not actually convinced that I'll have better luck given that you have to choose between another nVidia card or ATI which apparently is not having much better luck with drivers.

The sad part is I really could care less about high end video. I don't play games and I don't plan on doing heavy 3D work with WPF, so I don't exactly need the super high end tweaked out video card. But the choices on machines these days are either the worthless built in video cards (Intel etc.) or a high end card that's 'state of the art' and in contant tweak mode. This is really sucky.

And yes I've checked this out on brand new Vista install on a second hard disk and it appears similar problems exist (especially in regards to the dual monitor issue). <sigh>

Posted in Vista WPF

Feedback for this Weblog Entry

re: nVidia vs. WPF
by Sylvain July 23, 2007 @ 12:24 pm

Rick,

I have an nVidia Quatro NVS 110M on a latitude D620, it's not the best card ever but it's pretty code for development. They recently shipped new drivers through windows update and since then the nVidia control panel has a few more options that I can use and I can finally have Aero running when using dual monitors.

I still have problems with the second monitor position being moved (not sure if it is because I have it rotated), it also does not save the vertical refresh rate of 2nd monitor and the screens both goes black for a few second after I unlock the station.

I haven't tried WPF but if you have a small app that you always crash your drivers I can test it on my setup if you send it to me.

re: nVidia vs. WPF
by Jeff Atwood July 23, 2007 @ 1:50 pm

First, try updating video drivers via the site http://laptopvideo2go.com -- they offer *.inf modified versions of the latest official nvidia drivers, which cheekily refuse to install on "vendor support only" laptop.

re: nVidia vs. WPF
by Rick Strahl July 23, 2007 @ 3:15 pm

Hi Jeff - already doing that <s>. If it weren't for those drivers the machine would have gone through the window long ago <g>. The newer drivers are better than what came down in January with Windows Update and also the 'official' Dell driver which is the same version.

re: nVidia vs. WPF
by Dave April 04, 2008 @ 1:42 pm

I'm seeing lots of issues with my nVidia 6200 on Vista x64 when it comes to WPF apps. The lastest beta drivers as of this writing (GeForce 174 beta) finally allow me to run the Microsoft Expression suite without blaring issues like invisible windows and frequent crashes, but I still see wierd issues like context menus not popping up and things not drawing until I drag a window in front of them.
Also, WPF apps run about 10x SLOWER with the driver loaded vs. using the built-in default Windows driver. I'd just use the built-in all the time, but it only supports up to 1280x1024 resolution. I don't play games or need high performance graphics, but I do like DVI and I need my applications to work.

re: nVidia vs. WPF
by Craig Banks July 15, 2008 @ 10:59 am

I realize this blog post is a bit old but nearly a year later here I am researching WPF video refresh issues.

I have an application I'm developing that essentially has an Outlook clone look and feel. Intermittently, certain panes or sections of the interface will turn to gibberish. Resizing the app then maximizing it will refresh everything and all is well - for a brief while. I suspect it's a video card issue because other developers using my app or working on similar apps cloned from mine have no issues. It's never come up in demos. I'm the only one using a Dell laptop with an nVidia Quadro NVS 110M card.

It's unlikely users will be using a computer with an nVidia card but it's scary to think unresolved hardware issues could turn my app into a support nightmare.

re: nVidia vs. WPF
by Jon Harrop July 20, 2008 @ 5:19 pm

Have you tried installing Linux and seeing if OpenGL applications cause similar problems in order to determine whether or not your hardware is faulty?

We have been using nVidia graphics cards exclusively for the best part of a decade and (apart from some instability on dual-CPU machines many years ago) we have had very few problems with them. nVidia's drivers tend to be very high quality.

Also, we recently diversified onto the Microsoft Windows platform and found the general quality of the software (from Microsoft) to be extremely poor in comparison to Linux, particularly in the context of graphics. In particular, Managed DirectX (MDX) is very poorly designed and is the source of much instability as a consequence. So comparing with Linux on the same hardware is a great way to determine whether or not it is a hardware problem.

PS: Whatever you do, don't ever install the recently-released .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 beta. The uninstaller is broken and it causes widespread faults like the ones you are describing. Repairing your computer is seriously tedious as well... :-(

re: nVidia vs. WPF
by boomhauer August 26, 2008 @ 9:40 am

and here we are in aug 08, im having more headaches with wpf and .net 3.5 SP1 (final release)... on my quadro fx 1400 vid card, if i use a visualbrush as a background tile in a canvas... and then resize the edge of the window repeatedly... memory use climbs rapidly and never is released. I sat there for a while doing this and the app was using over 500 megs. GC.Collect does nothing to help. Im assuming it's my vid card, i havent seen other pc's do this, but will i have to worry about my customers having weird things like this happen? not fun at all.