Graphics card timing out

[JoanneO_Brien]

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

[MatthiasBuehler1]

Hi !

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

[larryzhang]

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,

[MatthiasBuehler1]

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

[DevinLavigne]

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.

[Anonymous User]

4K monitor!!! Awesome. 

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

[KathrynAngleton]

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.