NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT - Freezing?

Hi there.

Firstly, thank you for a great binding - I have found that JOGL is very reliable and problems are few and far between!

In fact, the issue that I’m experiencing may not be to do with JOGL at all (I have suspicions that it’s a graphics driver bug) but I would like to air it here just in case.

On Mac OS X 10.5.2 with an NVidia 8800GT on an Intel-based Mac, I’m seeing intermittent freezes. When this happens, everything freezes (including other applications and the dock). It is still possible to move the mouse. It can last in the region of 2 seconds or more, the average probably being around 7. Sometimes it just gives up completely and the machine has to be reset. The problem occurs more frequently if there is more to render in the scene of the application.

I ran the OpenGL Profiler to dig a bit deeper and it appears to sometimes lock up when calling CGLFlushDrawable() at the end of each frame. Instead of taking 200 microseconds, it can suddenly take much longer (as above). For example, this is one of the freezes:

7260626.22 µs CGLFlushDrawable();
0.00 µs CGLUpdateContext(0x00936600);

Usually, it’s more like this:

207.32 µs CGLFlushDrawable();
0.00 µs CGLUpdateContext(0x00936600);

The same application runs smoothly on other machines (with different cards or different operating systems). My questions are simply as follows:

  • Has anybody else experienced a similar issue?
  • Is it possible that it’s a JOGL bug, or more likely to be a graphics driver/OS issue (even hardware I suppose)?

Through experimentation I have found that including a ‘glFlush’ after rendering each geometry in the scene appears to make the problem go away, but of course the frame-rate plummets so this is by no means a recommended workaround. However, it may help to determine the cause.

Many thanks folks.

We’ve seen similar issues with some of the JOGL demos running on recent MacBook Pros with the NVidia GeForce 8600M processors. The issue is almost certainly a graphics driver bug. I would recommend you report the issue along with a test case to Apple.

Thank you for getting back to me - I’ll certainly follow this up with Apple! Interestingly, we have also seen the Mac Book Pro 8600M issue that you mention, though it doesn’t seem to freeze up as frequently as on the 8800GT.

As of this evening, I’m also seeing the same ‘freezing’ on the NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT on a dual-core AMD box (Windows XP) with the latest drivers from the NVIDIA website. Is it still likely to be a graphics driver bug, considering that it manifests on the PC as well as on the Mac? Many thanks for your time.