Grfx Drivers and Computer Stability in Unity

I have two mid sized games that have been severely hampered in ongoing development due to Unity crashes to desktop, mostly silent. The application just disappears with no bug reporter while idling in Edit mode. I have a Power Computing gaming rig with an i7 processor and 32 gigs of RAM and a GTX 1080. Countless hours of investigation shows this happening to Unity games and applications for quite a while as any google search will verify. I have done all the necessary..updated to latest drivers, tried many combinations of settings in control panels, device manager and system settings for display and they will not go away. Drivers are updated from Device Manager and GeForce and any game overlays have been uninstalled. I have done everything plus that the bug QA team has specified.

Some of the symptoms displayed are
-models will get what looks like a vertex or vertices popping which display as a black spike for a frame coming a meter or two off the surface of the mesh.
-screen tearing where the Edit or Play viewport, but not the editor UI will get a white tear across it.

My research into resolving this has led to innumerable short threads with the complaints on reddit and nVidia discussion forums, a few blog posts and similar. Mostly by gamers or if by Unity devs not much info was relayed I could make any kind of decision as to how to stabilize this. I note that not any of the principles tech support folks ever chimed in on any of these threads. It is like they are ignoring it and hoping it goes away on it own. Assassins Creed and something something Tarkov being two large Unity games with innumerable complaints that seem exact replicas of this ongoing issue of silently crashing within second or minutes of opening the application. Many more were encountered with the core complaint being Unity..though of course my research was biased due to the keywords used in said search.

I have noted that many gamers who use AMD grfx hardware do not have these complaints. I am hoping to compile data in this thread that will either lead to a resolution of the nVidia graphics driver issue, assure me that if I get the investor to foot the bill for a high end AMD card that the issue will go away or force the triumvirate of MicroSoft, Unity and nVidia to focus their combined resources to pinpoint the issue and provide a proper and permanent resolution to umpteen problems encounter by Unity dev and end product consumers.

So, please feel free to chime in and provide experiences, stable driver versions or "nope..never experienced this on AMD" or whatever you folks can contribute that may lead to resolution of this multi-year ongoing issue.

 

Next steps would be:
1. Check if the problem exists on another computer with same configuration.
2. Check if GPU is overheating.
3. Stress-test the system/GPU.
4. Check if there are error messages in system error log (event viewer).

Also...

Would be nice to see a screenshot of that happening. Additionally would be a good idea to know if this happens to skeletal meshes or all of them.

 

Is the CPU or GPU overclocked?
How hot are the CPU and GPU running when you see the problem?

The GTX 1080 is a popular card. It can run a bit hot, though. Check the temp with CPUID HWMonitor. That tool will show temps for CPU and GPU.

I personally run an Nvidia card in each of my PCs. I have never run into the problems you are describing. I have used Unity with several different Nvidia cards over the years including GTX 780, GTX 1070, GTX 1080ti, and RTX 2080ti.

It is possible your specific card may be having an issue. I doubt there is a wide spread Nvidia specific issue. I don't know if getting another card would solve your issue or not.

 

It happens to a skeletal mesh and to a motorcycle mesh with no rigging in the Tail Of The Dragon . It also happens with Unity terrain system and trees. It happens in the Cyclotronica game with tunnels of about 16K polys and with particles ands the designer says it won't load on the PC sometimes before crashing due to some package manager conflict the bug qa team blew him off about.. Both of these crashes happen on another PC and not as frequently on a new Mac laptop. System is water-cooled and will happen after the machine has been shut off all night and just restarted. Unless the cards get hot in 5 minutes I do not think it is heat related..but could possibly be. Checking the CPU and GPU with the system tools show nothing incompatible or wrong.

 

A GPU or CPU can get hot in a few minutes, and cooling being attached does not necessarily mean the chip is being cooled. Basically, you need to get sensor readings to see what's going on, with air/radiator cooling in the past I frequently ran into situation where thermal paste/pad would dry out and that would result in overheating.

Would be nice to see a picture of the glitch you're describing on the bike, as long as you are completely sure the bike is not somehow a skinned mesh. Of course, unless there's an NDA involved. In case of skinned meshes spikes tend to appear in case of busted skin weights, or incorrect transform. Another possibility is having a NaN somewhere in object transform.

However, I do not have a 100% sure idea what it could be.

 

The system can be booted after a night of sitting off and still exhibit the issue within five to ten minutes of booting and immediately loading Unity. Thanks for the tip on the CPUID HW Monitor. I have been searching for such a tool but got bunches of crap based on my keyword searches. The entire system is water cooled. The CPU board is a GigaByte board. The card looks like it has chrome pipes so I am assuming it is water cooled as well. How do I underclock it? I have not been able to find that info either.

The searches on my problem bring up innumerable problems with Unity games crashing on the GTX 1080 with no driver resolution.

I just want to work. I get on a roll and have all this data in my brain, get slammed over and over with silent crashes one after the other and then forget what the hell I was doing.

 

I have rebuilt the bike and optimized the mesh and exported as an FBX from C4D R20. Made sure there was no stray points. As I ponder this I believe whether a crash is from a bad shader or NaN error it should not silently crash the application. It should throw a console error and handle the exception. Is there some reason Unity cannot do that?

Hard to get screenshots as it happens in a split second and may or may not crash silently.

 

Never heard of thermal paste. How the heck would you and where would you apply such?

Just downloaded the CPUID Monitor mentioned above. GPU is 105F and 41C. Fn is currently 0 RPM. Is that correct for a low temp and does it kick on only higher or should I be concerned about that?

 

NaN would not crash application, but it could produce black spikes you were talking about. Also, encountering NaN does not necessarily produce error aside from artifacts. If NaN is fed into a shader or appears inside a shader, that should not result in exception being thrown.

If capturing screenshots is difficult a video could do. Then you could look thorugh the video for the point where spikes appear. Once again... if it isn't an "under NDA" stuff and you're comfortable doing that... OBS Studio can record your desktop and is available for free.

Regarding crash, you'd need to investigate locations where unity writes crash logs in hopes that something is written there, in best case you could get a stack trace with symbols in C# code. In the worst case you'll get a stack trace into deep part of the engine with no symbols or no trace at all.

Thermal paste is applied between GPU or CPU and their radiator. Depending on your region, Thermal Pad may be more common.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_paste
Apparently it can be called thermal gel or heat sink compound. Some brands can dry out in which case they lose (heat) conductivity and CPU temp goes up until it is replaced. However, I believe that brands available in your area would be of higher grade, and chances of it drying out is low. Indication of thermal gel issues used to be a CPU(CPU, not GPU) temp in ballpark of 70 degrees celsius after cold boot while idling. Usually such system would reach 90 degrees under load, and quickly perform safety shutoff. GPU overheating, in my experience, could result in visible artifacts, texture corruption, or system-wide freeze.

It is a good low temp and woudl rule out dried thermal gel. However, I"d try to stress test GPU under load to see if it crashes it. I think @Ryiah could give a good advice on it, as she seems to be more enthusiastic about hardware than I am, but apparently FurMark, "Haven" and "Superposition" are popular choices.

 

I had a gt9800 with just a passive cooler that could overhead and lead to visual glitches. In that case it usually was textures looking super glitched out and then shortly after the game crashed.

Unless you see the watercooling being connected to it, those pipes might just be regular heatpipes that are part of a normal cooling solution.

Yep, furmark is good for a GPU heat stress test as far as I know.

Just a word of caution, some thermal pastes contain electro-conductive components and you need to be careful not to apply it to thick or to the wrong parts. Less is more. If you don't need it, probably better not to mess with it.

 

Yep. I've been picking non-conductive paste, but if it isn't overheating, best not to touch the paste.

 

The CPUID had a link to other software that finds drivers. It found a nVidia driver that the system and nVidia control panel could not find yesterday. I did a clean install and watched it remove ShadowPlay and a bunch of GeForce crap that previous installs and uninstalling from the system software supposedly did but apparently did not using their clean install versions. I now have Unity open on a huge 100 terrain scene. Temp is at 50 - 58C/122-136 and the fan has kicked on at 0min - 1162max RPM.

The driver software found a bunch of Intel chipset drivers out of date. Scares the eff out of me to update that stuff.

Thanks for all the tips and advice so far. I really appreciate it folks! I had been a Mac user for 20+ years and only got this honking PC in 2017 from the folks who wanted the Tail Of The Dragon road game made. I do nothing on it except Unity dev and web searches for said dev. I am learning much about the system just from the tips and software pointed out here.

 

Yolo! I mean... make a system backup before you do that.

A couple years ago I had a good experience with one of those fully automated driver update tools. I just unselected a couple that I didn't want it to mess with, like the wacom driver, and I let it do its thing and that fixed a recurring but rare BSOD crash issue that came from a component for which I could just not find a driver on my own. And my google-fu is pretty strong, I have no idea why I didn't find it. The tool was "driverfusion" but afaik it's no longer actively maintained, so I can't recommend it anymore.

I believe shadowplay installs with "Geforce experience" and I always uncheck that when I install new nvidia drivers.

 

I have a huge forest scene in the Editor Scene view and still see small black squares popping and random diagonal white tears across the viewport but nowhere else. GPU temp at 48C/118F current and max was 61C/141F. Any values I should report back form the CPUID that may help diagnose this?

 

You should try recording the artifacts so other people could get a better idea of what's going on.... once again, if NDA allows that.

Otherwise I'd recommend to stress test the GPU with FurMark or anything else just in case.

Is it more usable after driver update now? Did it stop crashing?

 

Does stuff like this happen in Unreal Engine Editor or Games as well? How about other GPU based 3D software? The temperature is fine and if it was a Hardware issue, I'd expect to see it accross all engines, not just Unity.

 

I had few more crashes earlier. It seems to be stabilized now. I can work in C4D on very large files. The tearing and glitches are limited to viewports only in Unity. Wish I knew more. I see that 3 of the CPU cores of 8 maxed out at 100%. CPU clocks are hovering between 3990 and 4200. Nvidia grfx clocks maxed at Graphics 1898 but are at 139, Memory maxed at 5006 but are idling at 405 now and Video maxed at 1686 but are idling at 544 now. Frame Buffer maxed at 60% but idling at 9%. Built in grfx chip Intel 530 clock maxed at 1101 and idling at 0. Any data that would be pertinent from the CPUID readouts I should share?

 

I have seen CPU and GPU issues over the years where the thermal paste went bad and stop working effectively. When that happens, you can get an instant over heat regardless of the type of cooling you use. I have even seen some i7-8700k CPUs that had terrible thermal paste issues under the IHS, and those could overheat in seconds even with really nice water cooling setups. De-lidding was the only real fix for that situation.

You can underclock your CPU through the BIOS. Simply reduce the max multiplier for the CPU.

You can underclock your GPU with the MSI Afterburner tool. The Afterburner tool is what many people use to overclock Nvidia cards. It can also be used to underclock the cards.

 

I think those temps are fine. Usually on Nvidia cards, you want to worry if the temp is over 80C and some people even get away with up to 90C. The Nvidia cards will actually throttle themselves to protect against damage from overheating. If your max is only 61C, then you are not getting into the throttling or shutdown thresholds.

 

What is de-lidding? Also using the driver app linked from CPUID I found a number of drivers for the intel chipset that were older. Would this be causing the issues I am seeing? The motherboard is a GigaByte branded board. Seems pretty tough..we get power glitches up here being at the end of the powerlines right before national forest. The Mac will stay shut off but the PC will hold on if less than a second or two and not shut down. I also had Oculus software which the SOBs make near impossible to shut down or uninstall. I see a couple of Oculus audio drivers. I noted that many gamers got rid of crashes shutting off VR related processes. BTW..thank again for folks on this thread giving me an education in the guts of the system. Trying to find tools for the PC seemed to just run into malware red flags every time I searched.

 

Taking the lid off. Don't try it:

 

it is very hard to diagnose something blindly, so I would like to join to those who asked for screenshot(s) and/or video about those artifacts, preferably with the settings showing as well.
If those artifacts are only inside the game view, it is probable that they are some kind of missed setting or (should be known) limitation.
Also while you're at it, you should check if Unity actually runs on the dedicated video card and not on the built-in Intel garbage. That's great for desktop applications, but usually devastatingly bad for any 3D apps.
Also make sure you have connected your display to the GPU (NVidia) not to the motherboard (built-in).

 

Unity bug tech qa team said it is the drivers. They admitted to the designer who happens to be my son of the other game Cyclotronica that they are getting lots of driver crashes. It happens on his PC that has just been rebuilt with a new card and on his Mac laptop but nowhere near as often. The display has been plugged into the same place it has been since I had it. The intel GPU does not register when Unity is opened but the Nvidia does. The crash reports show it to be the drivers. It has crashed randomly about 15 times today. It never crashed until about december after an update of Unity and windows sneaking an update in my backdoor and then shutting my machine down..I had updating tuned totally off but they found a way in anyways. Then big bang boom, the crashes started piling up. The first crashes were caused by a physx bug in the broadphase. They ignored me for months as I plotted it out using the physics debug view and sure enough in a winding tunnel when the rigidbodies hit the edge of a broadphase box the app crashed. After killing my bank account with their piss poor tech support they finally got back to me.. yeah it was crashing on their machine too. Another six weeks passed and they sent me an email "You will be happy to know we found the bug. It was in the broadphase physics". Told them so in early January when my steam roller of a level every three days crawled to zilch getting done in two weeks.

So what yer asking me to do is stop working, pile on more stress on the GPU by recording video of a 3840x2160 screen and then take it over to the mac to edit to a decently uploadable size, upload it to youtube at snails pace and then post the link tomorrow afternoon so you can verify that i am getting black glitches and white screen tears in both game and scene viewports. Ain't gonna happen homey. Pointless technically. I have to assume you think I am an idiot and do not know how to use the english language to describe the glitches. .Check my join date beside my avatar pic. I have used this app almost daily professionally since then.

Bottom line. If Unity admits that they are getting lots of driver crashes then Unity is probably responsible for the issue. I am trying to find a workaround, not prove to you I know what the hell I am doing. The project is big. But in scenes with just a single terrain and motorcycle sim it was doing the same thing..randomly crashing silently. My suspicion is that they are not putting any resources into the builtin renderer anymore and the new tech introduced in the core is conflicting... For example. The Cyclotronica game would not open at all on the PC in 3.14. The crash logs pinpointed the Package Manager. My son submitted a 2+ gb folder and was told they wouldn't bother with it because it was not 3.15..Does that sound like a QA team with a passion for fixing bugs or someone floating paycheque to paycheque? As well, tell me why they would want me to not use any VPN as that may be causing the crashes. I don't even send them crash reports anymore. I m sick and fed up of getting boilerplate responses with the same non-viable advice like they did to me for four+ months with Cyclotronica. Once in a while someone more familiar with me will let a few cats out of the bag like the admission they are getting many driver crash reports or don't use a VPN. Does the VPN include local networking between my mac and PC? If so what the heck does that have to do with Unity. It should have nothing at all in my honest and somewhat inflamed opinion.

Next time don't try to play gotcha games with me thanks and i will be civil in return. I do not need the extra frustration.

 

https://www.google.com/search?q=GTX...:1,cd_min:November+2019,cd_max:June+2020&tbm=

A specific search for GTX 1080 driver crashes and Unity starting when I began to have the issue. I would say that is one helluvalot of complaining Unity /Nvidia/Windows ain't paying attention to.

 

Well, my friend, then whatever. LOL. One more on ignore list.

 

I wanted to wait for a bit before responding to let the problem sit in my head and see if anything came to me, but after a little more than a week (starting from the time you directly messaged me) and no moment of insight it's time to start discussing it. I'll post my specifications just in case it helps in any way.

My system is running an AMD Ryzen 5 1600X with 32GB DDR4-2666 memory on a GIGABYTE motherboard. My graphics card is a reference model (meaning it's not running any factory overclocks) GTX 1080 but it has an aftermarket air cooler from the manufacturer which is EVGA.

There isn't a whole lot I can say about my company's projects thanks to NDAs, but I will mention that we're around the level of a vertical slice and we're using the HDRP but we're not using the terrain system. Everything is being custom modeled for our scenes and placed within the editor. One project is stylized realistic and one is realistic.

Our models are definitely high-poly though due to a limited viewing angle (2D gameplay but 3D environment).

Between the heatsink (or in your case the water block) and the processor. There are a few popular ways to apply the paste but you want to choose a method that spills it across the entire block. Below is an animated image showing different ways of applying. I typically use the "X" method.

There are a wide range of thermal pastes with a wide range of prices but you don't need to buy any of the expensive pastes. Below is one commonly recommended paste (if you buy a heatsink from the company making the paste they ship the paste with it which is how I got my tube). It's reasonably priced at just under $8 and is sufficient for 20 CPUs.

https://www.amazon.com/Noctua-NT-H1-Pro-Grade-Thermal-Compound/dp/B002CQU14A

Spoiler: Thermal Paste

Furmark will work for stress testing but be aware that it's designed to push your hardware to a degree that is unrealistic in real world applications. If your graphics card can run it for a period of time with no trouble then you have a solid card, but if it crashes it can potentially be due to Furmark being too extreme.

Unigine's Heaven and Superposition benchmarks were popular but they're past their prime with their replacements being mostly actual games. If you need a synthetic benchmark though 3DMark Time Spy Extreme is the one people use today but it's not free.

 

No, because tools like OBS Studio do not add much stress, and Youtube easily eats gigabytes of footage without previous editing. On modern machine you can easily play an AAA while recording it.

Something like that can record footage at decent quality:

Spoiler

So what people are asking you to press a button, demonstrate the glitch, press a button again, and upload a file. Your machine should be able to handle it. If it can't handle full resolution, it can handle half.

There's no problem with that whatsoever.

 

Ain't happening. There are black glitches on some models, example is random black squares on trees in the forest when zoomed out and vertex spikey things on some models and the screen tears white. You got enough imagination to picture that? That is what it looks like. I have the bandwidth of raccoon and two tin cans tied with string. My upload speed is 0.5 mbps and while that is occurring I cannot get to web pages, download files or do anything productive. I am not succumbing to tapping my foot awaiting a video upload to verify that there are black glitches and white tears intermittently. I have other things going on besides this that require me to have some usable bandwidth. Lord thundering armpits. I am looking for useful data. You two will look at the bloody thing and go.. oh..black glitches and white tears and be no farther ahead than my description. Take a look at the goggle link..for pages..unity...nvidia..crashes..games..folks jumping thru every technical hoop to play 10 minutes of their game. I was being reasonable and thankful for assistance and data until this bogus demand crap started. I am getting cranky now. That last round sent me for an old fart nap in frustration and disgust.

You cannot convince me that a video showing what I describe will allow any of you two geniuses to analyze what is occurring to fix it. I have a demand. Show me at least one good damned method you can apply to watch a video of black glitches and white screen tears and solve the issue.. <taps foot awaiting this..hah!>

 

Thanks for the highly useful data. I spent all day creating a splat map system and trying to overcome horrible looking grass in between restarting the app and have to spend time on an EasyRoads OSM implementation this evening, but when I get thoroughly miffed at working in Unity I will go through the Furmark tests. The most useful things posted were the analysis tools and data on reasonable limits of data that was outputting as whenever i tried searching for such prior all I got were links looking like malware installers and I keep the dev machine as clean as possible.

 

Not that you're in any position to make demands of people offering up their time to help you, but I always start analysing graphical issues by looking at them, then applying my knowledge of how things make it to the screen to figure out the most likely step where something is going wrong.

My first thought for this would be a busted LOD getting blended in, but I don't have anywhere near enough info to be sure. Is the black square in screen space or is it aligned with some part of the object? Is it before or after the object is blended into the scene?

We could play 20 questions, or you could give us a picture.

 

That's really not enough information. Many different artifacts match this description and that's why people are asking for screenshots/video.

If the artifacts are hard to catch, then you can record the video, and instead of uploading all of it, find the frame in the video where they occur, then either extract the frame or screenshot it, and upload a picture. No matter what your upload speed is, you should be able to upload several images.

And besides, you likely sleep sometimes, and can leave upload overnight, regardless of what your internet speed is.

An image will allow to narrow down the problem significantly. For example, "black square" could literally be a knocked out square in the texture, untextured square, or failure to alpha cut out transparent region. That's three different kind of glitches already. And that's not the end of it.

What you're doing currently is equivalent to asking people to diagnose car problem without letting them see or hear the car. In some cases it works, but it doesn't make things easier.

Basically, refusing to provide additional info will make it take longer and reduces chances of problem being solved significantly. At the very least if there's an image, then someone might walk by and say "Hey, I had this thing too and what's I did that". That aint' happening with just a text description.

 

Awesome dude. You have no idea how much I appreciate that. Less noise, more data.

 

You have no idea how busy I am in between this thread. I am behind on several money in the door tasks requiring documentation, artwork, code for microcontrollers, designing wood carvings, reading PDFs on the next step in setting up the OSM roadways and side objects, splat maps and cross-referencing google maps to do that all at once. I don't get those done I don't eat this week. The forest looks like it was an alpha channel glitch on a leaves plane. The character looks like a vertex pop. The white tears are what thousands of posts on google describe like this one https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/bewy4l/screen_tearing_problem_after_switching_from_20193/

I am using Linear color space. The stablest Graphics API is OpenGLCore where I get way less crashes than DirectX11. The bug team says to use force OpenGLCore. Scripting backend is IL2CPP. I use Incremental GC. Static Batching is on. Dynamic Batching is off. Use Graphics Jobs is on. Prebake Collision Meshes is on. Use DXGI Flip Model Swapchain is on. VSync Count is Every Vsync. Unity admits it is a driver issue and they have reports piling up. Watching it glitch white out of the corner of my eye whilst I keep up with folks honestly tying to resolve this on this thread.

 

I don't have the idea, of course.

However, if you need assistance with a particular glitch, you need to provide additional information, give people a way to reproduce the problem OR additional information in form of video/screenshots. And producing those should only take a few minutes.

Of course, if there are more urgent tasks, then dealing with the glitch should be probably put on hold.

 

Yer not in any position to offer me advice. I am the one getting demanded to do something I see no value in and wastes my extremely valuable time. I demanded nobody to reply here so cut the BS dude.. Seems other folks chimed in of their own accord and offered me tools to dig deeper. Yer the master of passive aggression and repetitive boilerplate. The crash logs say "Unity Caused an Access Violation(0xc000005)" The picture is useless. I am not playing that gambit out. This is caused by Unity not being able to find some .dll module and attempt to access an invalid address and then tons of hexadecimal. Don"t add more noise to this thread with yer underhanded antagonism tactics thanks. It was going fine until this _demand_ for a useless pic showed up and now it is consuming certain folks who I have not forced to reply to this thread. You are here just to pile on and be a jerk...and you know it pal.

 

No, I'm here because the question of how a picture would help is valid, and I had an answer.

I don't really care whether or not you liked the answer because it wasn't really for you. This is a public thread on an open forum.

That makes sense for the crashes. Are you sure the crashes and the glitches are caused by the same thing? Edit: I'll rephrase... It's entirely possible there's more than one problem here, so investigating them separately might help.

 

I estimate I got 200+ hours uploading my glitch problems to Unity since december and on multiple computers. I got 200+ hours going through google searches to see others with the same issue..Unity and Nvidia grfx drivers, screen glitching and crashes and seen a few hundred "try this method to solve it" of which I tried many to resolve this. I estimate I have lost over 1000 hours of productive time, missed a publisher deadline, drained my bank account, had an entire game level blow up to a state where it had to be rebuilt in a new project file by file. It started in 2019.3..just like thousands of posts on reddit and nvidia forums state. Seems that some thought put into that particular fact and Unity admitting they are getting lots of driver crash reports puts the onus on other than my work practices. The tools offered for analysis show my hardware to be in spec and running properly.

I will tell you what is suspicious from the crash logs. "Write to location 0000000000000000 caused an access violation" then this "Bytes at CS:EIP ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ??" Then it loads a Mono dll and write a few thousand lines of hexadecimal leading with
"Stack Trace of crashed thread 2392;
ERROR SymGetSymFromAddr64, GetLastError'The specified module could not be found.' (Address:0000197FEED56AO)
ERROR SymGetModuleInfo64, GetLastError ' A dynamic link library(DLL) initialization routine failed. (Address:0000197FEED56AO)"

You want to look under the hood to diagnose the car trouble..there is the system diagnostics. Looking at the paint job in't gonna fix it or understand it. Seems to me their is a dll Unity should be loading but can't. What that is I do not know but a pic of a screen tear ain't gonna load that library. Unity is trying to write to a location that shouldn't exist..sixteen zeroes??? That isn't an address that is like the null point of creation.

 

Yes I am sure. the crash logs state it. You think looking at the paint job is gonna fix the car. LOL! Unity is trying to write to an address that should not exist. It is trying to load a dll that is not there. I started this thread on a public forum to allow others with the same issues to access data about such crashes. Don't fill it with noise and antagonism and demands for useless pics. This is an engine problem, not a paint job gander.

 

The crash logs state that the "black squares" and the "vertex spikey things" are from the same cause as the crashes?

If only we could hear and see that engine we might be able to diagnose it.

Neginfinity already gave you examples of how different issues can result in different artifacts which fit your description. I also asked questions about the artifacts which could shed light on their potential causes.

No demands here. I find this stuff interesting. If you care to share info or pics I'd maybe engage for my own benefit.

 

https://answers.unity.com/questions/1441578/unity-editor-crash-problem-access-violation-0xc000.html
In a reply "The actual error is a general protection fault because the native code tries to read from an invalid memory address (specifically 0x0). I can confirm that the offending code at the current program counter is part of the Unity.exe. However it's just a method which might be called from somewhere. It's one of the parameters which are actually 0 (the RDI / edi register)."

https://www.google.com/search?q=Uni...ome..69i57.28911j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

 

Engage with the general protection fault then. Pics of it causing glitches are useless.

 

Aye, I understand what that error is. I'm asking why you think it's caused by the same thing as the graphical glitches?

 

A general protection fault (GPF) in the x86 instruction set architectures (ISAs) is a fault (a type of interrupt) initiated by ISA-defined protection mechanisms in response to an access violation caused by some running code, either in the kernel or a user program. The mechanism is first described in Intel manuals and datasheets for the Intel 80286 CPU, which was introduced in 1983; it is also described in section 9.8.13 in the Intel 80386 programmer's reference manual from 1986. A general protection fault is implemented as an interrupt (vector number 13 (0Dh)). Some operating systems may also classify some exceptions not related to access violations, such as illegal opcode exceptions, as general protection faults, even though they have nothing to do with memory protection. If a CPU detects a protection violation, it stops executing the code and sends a GPF interrupt. In most cases, the operating system removes the failing process from the execution queue, signals the user, and continues executing other processes. If, however, the operating system fails to catch the general protection fault, i.e. another protection violation occurs before the operating system returns from the previous GPF interrupt, the CPU signals a double fault, stopping the operating system. If yet another failure (triple fault) occurs, the CPU is unable to recover; since 80286, the CPU enters a special halt state called "Shutdown", which can only be exited through a hardware reset. The IBM PC AT, the first PC-compatible system to contain an 80286, has hardware that detects the Shutdown state and automatically resets the CPU when it occurs. All descendants of the PC AT do the same, so in a PC, a triple fault causes an immediate system reset.

 

I think it is causing the glitches . The CPU tries to recover. The screen glitches due to CPU not "talking" with the graphics card or probably vice versa. In the case it happens twice before the CPU can recover the program crashes. Further investigation show it to be undocumented functions of ntdll, whatever the hell that is...trying to write to null timeout which is infinity.

 

Unity or Nvidia is creating a process that shuffles an address space. The driver tries to register a callback and it ain't there. The CPU throws a protection fault as the address is null. The screen glitches. It tries again and sometimes the address is there and Unity does not crash. If it tries again and the address is still null it throws a general protection fault and Unity crashes. How that is fixed I have no clue yet. I have no idea how to create a system wide API interceptor that monitors every GDI function in existence at any given point. I still think this is something Unity/Nvidia/Windows need to get together and figure out. This is not isolated to my system.

 

Assuming that is the case I don't think you can fix it from the using Unity end, aside from by identifying what triggers that particular bug and avoiding it.

However, you said that this is also happening on a Mac?

 

https://forum.unity.com/threads/uni...player-dll-caused-an-access-violation.556585/

I have hailed one of the best of the Unity techs over to this thread. This was the gentleman apologized to me publicly for the bad advice the bugs QA team gave me prior. Went and checked how many bug reports I filed and the sorry boilerplate advice given to me over and over. I have just cleaned the computer down to bare bones. I am still getting screen tearing as I write this.

WTH. I just tried uninstalling Unity 5.5.0b8 and it said I would have to close the scene I am working on??? I am on 2019.3.15f1! What's going on there? That was the first Unity install made on this machine and it was a beta. It does not make any sense to me.

 

One thing I noticed in your post is that you are running 3840x2160 resolution. Just as a test, try using 1080p and 1440p. Just try those lower resolutions to see if the same problem occurs at lower resolutions. The GTX 1080 is a solid 1440p card for most games, but it is only average at 4K resolution.

Also, if you want to grab a single screenshot from a large video on PC, I recommend using VLC media player. It has a little button that looks like a camera. Click that and it will save a screenshot of the current frame of your video. That way you can upload just a quick screenshot instead of a large video.

 

I had tried the lower resolutions. The text was huge and scaling was all over the place, Small text in some cases, huge text in Unity. Scaling from System Settings did not do the trick..after an hour of scrolling and scrolling I reverted. I cna take screenshot with the SnipIt tool. Do that all the time. I still think that pic will yield absolutely nothing except standard screen tearing. The Access Violation issue that was resolved prior was on Unity's end as per the thread linked above. I hailed that tech over to this thread. The folks who did not have the Citrix application which was causing it were told by him that it was Unitys' fault. it appears to have resurfaced..and WTH with the Unity 5.5.0b8 being my version I am running right now when trying to uninstall all older versions of Unity using the Uninstaller.?? It dialogued that I would have to close the Scene i am working on to uninstall.

 

Yes, but nowhere near as frequently an a two year old MacBook Pro and on Cyclotronica, not this one I m bitching about, Tail Of The Dragon. Same symptoms on his PC as on mine but perhaps even worse..unable to open without a crash.