FabFilter

Hi FabFilter.

I've run into a somewhat annoying issue lately, which seems to be OpenGL related. Using Cubase 6.5.5 on Windows 8.1 &4Bit with an nVidia 640 GT fanless card on a GigaByte X58A UD3 mobo. Latest drivers for everything.

When re-opening a session that was saved with a lot of plugin windows opened, sometimes the system will freeze completely upon loading. And by freeze i mean, mouse-movement, but no respons to keyboard input, mouse-clicks, ctrl-alt-del ect ..

However - if i set the GraphicsAcceleration=0 regedit key, everything opens as expected. The pluings in the session is a mix of FabFilter, Waves (which also uses OpenGL), UAD and some other misc. stuff ..

Do you have an idea on the issue? I'd be happy to help you debug this somehow, if you can provide me with instructions ..

Best,
Rune

Not sure any of this will apply to your situation, but I didn't start experiencing freezing issues on my computer until somewhat recently. One commonly cited culprit is the major nVidia driver changes after 314.22. Ultimately though it was uninstalling Chrome and all it's backend services that are not automatically uninstalled when uninstalling Chrome itself that solved my problem. Chrome (not my default browser) didn't even have to be running for my computer to start freezing. It was the backend service causing the problems. It took me a week to track down the cause of the freezes. Hopefully you will have better luck.

I don't have experience with the UAD plugins but I would put the FabFilter and Waves plugins in the very stable, just work with no hassle category. On the opposite side of the spectrum are plugins like Kontakt and Reaktor which have caused more crashes, freezes, and made it so projects would not open than all my other plugins combined, though I have recently been purchasing some boutique plugins from smaller companies that are giving Kontakt and Reaktor a run for their money in the instability category.

@Greg: Interesting info regarding the Chrome backend service. I'm running the latest NVIDIA 334.89 driver myself and have Chrome installed without any problems though.

@Rune: Unfortunately in the end we have to rely on good graphics drivers. Did you upgrade to the latest drivers first?

Cheers,

Yeah, reading thread after thread about freezing issues while I was dealing with mine it was apparent that the issues were generally difficult to reproduce, and that most people with similar builds, software, updated drivers, etc wouldn't be experiencing the problems. There would be long lists of possible fixes (workarounds) one of which might work for handful of people, but not most, and the potential workarounds often required registry edits, bios changes, or uninstalling background services like mine happened to require. It's a lot easier to track a problem down if it actually crashes your computer. Sadly my issue wasn't really fixed. Since the Chrome devs can't duplicate it they are left in a similar situation as you where all they can do is recommend that folks update their drivers and hope for the best. For those of us that updated drivers doesn't help we aren't left with many options beyond simply uninstalling it. Fortunately for Rune, if he can't track his problem down he can simply not save his sessions with open plugins.

Thanks for the tips, guys .. Next time i run into the issue, i'll definitely try and do a bit of trouble-shooting.

I should add, that i've never experienced this issue on Win7 - but i guess i didn't have an nVidia card back then. When upgrading to Win8 my ATI gave me major glitches, and i narrowed it down to whenever the card was switching GPU clock-frequency, which was quite unpredicatble. The card was fanless, so i guess they had to do it for thermal reasons, but clearly something wasn't done right driver-wise, and there was no way to disable it, so i had to pick up an nVidia card instead .. problem solved .. or so i thought ;)

Anyway - i have a 100% work-around (the reg hack) and it's more of an annoyance than a show-stopping bug, but if there was some way to log it, or otherwise figure out what was happening i'd be happy to help out nailing the issue ..

I'll definitely have a look at the Chrome services the next time it happens.