topic Re: Graphics card timing out in ArcGIS CityEngine Questions

Graphics card timing out

JoanneO_Brien — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 22:01:42 GMT

Hi

I'm getting a new issue today, concerning my graphic's card. I have a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 graphics card which has been basically fine until today. What I've been trying to do is assign different rule files and styles to each of my building parcels but after about four times it crashes and gives an OpenGL "lost connection" error. Note I wasn't generating any of the buildings and I'd removed my terrain layer after the first crash. Apparently this has to do with the imposed time limit being exceeded but their first solution was reducing the graphics workload. Since I'm not generating the buildings and don't have the terrain layer imported I don't understand why it's decided to not work now. I'm using a new city scene but it generates perfectly well in the old cityscene with the same models!

Any clues as to why this is happening and how I can fix it?

Thanks

Joanne

Re: Graphics card timing out

MatthiasBuehler1 — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 11:29:56 GMT

Hey Joanne !

First, I'd try to upgrade the graphics driver. Just search for your specific graphics card model on the nvidia homepage.

Secondly, if you still get crashes, search your harddrive for a file calles somewhat 'hs_err'. If you find one of those files which got created just in the minute of the crash, post it here. But try first to upgrade to the very latest driver.

Let me know ..

m.

Re: Graphics card timing out

JoanneO_Brien — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 20:33:55 GMT

Hi

1) I tried upgrading the graphics card but unfortunately that had no effect
2) I looked in the location where my computer stores the 'hs_err' files for CE but there hasn't been one created for this date.
3) I tried creating a whole new city scene but this issue always occurs at the same point, although now sometimes instead of shutting CE down it causes the Viewport to have a black scene, so I still can't work in it and have to restart CE. In my scene I've imported a shape file that I'd exported from another CE scene and I'm attempting to assign styles from a rule file I'd previously created. I did some testing and the rule files assign and generate perfectly fine with other shape files, so I suspect it has something to do with my imported shapefile from another CE scene. What part of the export/import process could cause this?

Thanks for your help!

Joanne

Re: Graphics card timing out

JoanneO_Brien — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 21:02:24 GMT

So I had thought the errors might be associated with the specific parcels but then I used a completely new set of parcels and started assigning the styles only to get it crashing again. Is there a specific limit to how many styles you can have with one rule file? This file has about 15 styles but after assigning about 5 of them it decides to have the error and crash again...

Re: Graphics card timing out

MatthiasBuehler1 — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 07:28:20 GMT

Hi Joanne !

You should now have my mail address. Maybe you can send me a broken-down part of the project with the assets and textures which cause CE to crash if you generate a specific Lot.

Let me know if this is possible.

Matthias

Re: Graphics card timing out

JoanneO_Brien — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 22:18:17 GMT

I've sent you an email. Let me know if you need any other data 🙂

Re: Graphics card timing out

NicoleMiller — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 19:38:51 GMT

Please update this thread if you reach a solution because I am having similar problems/

Re: Graphics card timing out

MatthiasBuehler1 — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 09:01:15 GMT

Hi !

The further discussion via mail was the following:

1] Update to the very latest graphics card driver.
2] Deactivate Shadows and Ambient Occlusion in the viewport settings menu since they slow down the rendering
3] The graphics card driver crashes if the viewportport takes longer than 1-2 seconds to render ( ~ 0.5 fps refresh rate ).

CE (and all other OpenGL-enabled applications at the same time) is crashed due to a timeout of the graphics card driver itself, so there's not really something we can do other than to try and prevent that the fps drops below 1fps.

Let me know if this makes sense ..

Matt

Re: Graphics card timing out

NicoleMiller — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 19:41:36 GMT

Yes, that made a lot of sense. I didn't realize that having such a bad framerate would be so troublesome. This information paired with the ATI post was most helpful, thank you very much!

Re: Graphics card timing out

SantiagoRivera — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 13:37:02 GMT

Hi !

The further discussion via mail was the following:

1] Update to the very latest graphics card driver.
2] Deactivate Shadows and Ambient Occlusion in the viewport settings menu since they slow down the rendering
3] The graphics card driver crashes if the viewportport takes longer than 1-2 seconds to render ( ~ 0.5 fps refresh rate ).

CE (and all other OpenGL-enabled applications at the same time) is crashed due to a timeout of the graphics card driver itself, so there's not really something we can do other than to try and prevent that the fps drops below 1fps.

Let me know if this makes sense ..

Matt

Hi Matt,

I'm just new user and I'm testing CE's capabilities and workflow with a test 2012 version. I'm on lesson 4th of the tuts and I'm really surpised and motivated with the app. About graphic cards issues I was asking myself if there is some kind of incompatibilities with other high demand graphic card apps as maya, 3dsmax, photoshop, after effects, UDK, autocad or drafsight, or their own plugins. Often users have running at the same time several apps as those, everyone using its own card driver gestion and memory on parallel mode, one with OpenGL, other with Nitrous, other with DirectX and so on. Would be possible some issues related here be caused of running simultaneously apps as those?.

Thanks.

Re: Graphics card timing out

MatthiasBuehler1 — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 07:50:21 GMT

Hi !

Never heard of such limitations. You should be fine to work!

GPUs and timeout detection in Win 7

larryzhang — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 09:05:25 GMT

Hi !

Never heard of such limitations. You should be fine to work!

In fact, we didn't see this issue in other popular 3D applications before.

We do realize that CE is an memory-intensive 3D application. It is why we intend to increase massive memory for CE. However, the second common stability issue in CityEngine is when the system appears completely "frozen" or "hung" while processing an operation like rendering, editing and querying.

We generally wait a while and then reboot the system (or the system automatically close the CE). This results in nothing being updated on the screen, thus appearing to the user that the system is frozen.

I am wondering if there is any effective small program/tool interface available for users to easily configure the registry (GPUs and timeout detection, etc.) suitable for CityEngine running smoothly.

Personally, it is good idea for CE team to develop it urgently, if not yet. Without it, it is really annoying and frustrating, while working with CE in operation.

Regards,

Re: Graphics card timing out

MatthiasBuehler1 — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 21:48:47 GMT

Hi ..

I have tried again replicating the time out and thus crash of CE. with use of a python script, but I was not able to crash it. Though I did have such crashes before too.

To be able to track the issue down, we need a proper way to reproduce the crash consistently. If you have a specific scene or general way of forcing a timeout of the driver, I'd be happy to hear about it.

Please let me know..

Matt

Re: Graphics card timing out

DevinLavigne — Sat, 24 Jan 2015 03:59:57 GMT

I was having this problem to, but I resolved it yesterday. I have a 4K monitor with two 970GTX SLI NVIDIA cards. My models were constantly timing out. Sometimes it would crash simply previewing a rule file or texture in the preview window. At first I thought it was a memory issue related to the high resolution or the fact that I was running my workspace in a Dropbox folder. I did two things that have helped.

First, I updated my video driver with one released yesterday (347.25 WHQL).

Second, I now pause Dropbox syncing while working in CityEngine. I noticed CityEngine was constantly uploading changed files. I suspected at times CityEngine may have been waiting for a file to become available or was receiving write errors from files in use.

I'm not sure which one, or both were the cause, but I've been crash free for 2 days.

Re: Graphics card timing out

Anonymous User — Mon, 26 Jan 2015 18:50:56 GMT

4K monitor!!! Awesome.

I would expect using a synced dropbox folder would kill performance. Glad you have it working.

Re: Graphics card timing out

KathrynAngleton — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 14:11:04 GMT

I'd like to bump this thread. I'm currently working off a 64-bit OS with 32GB of RAM and an NVIDIA Quadro K2000 graphics card with the drivers all up-to-date. I've noticed in the few years I've been using CityEngine that no matter how small or simple a scene gets (and this is even with all the improvements from CE 2012 to CE 2017.1), that my projects still continue to choke. I know I don't have the newest or most expensive graphics card, but it should be good enough to create the types of scenes I'm doing. It seems that the way CityEngine was written/created doesn't fully utilize the processing power of the GPU. I've given up on using photo-realistic textures for my buildings as just a half square mile of a scene was too much. These days, I just use color for models to create the analysis or effects I want, but even sometimes using 5 or more colors on models in the same layer will choke a scene. This software is great because there's truly nothing else out there like it, however, all these years later, I'm still noticing some major processing limitations.