The Intel Graphic Crash & How to Fix It.

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Irongron
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The Intel Graphic Crash & How to Fix It.

Post by Irongron » Wed Oct 10, 2018 2:51 pm

Will give the key facts firsts, for those more interested in the solution than the cause, then go into more detail.

THE PROBLEM: Players with certain graphic cards were reporting frequent crashes on EE in certain exterior areas, generally their most complex. In what Symphony had termed the 'PW Capital City Crash syndrome' In many cases this was happening every 30 seconds or so.

HOW SERVERS CAN FIX IT:

In the Toolset: Open the 'Environement Properties' of affected areas an ensure the 'Sun Shadows' and 'Moon Shadow' boxes are unchecked. This is the work of a moment and thus far has had a 100% success rate by our afffected players.

With NWNX: Add a plugin that simply disables this function across the entire module, whether or not the checkbox is activated

Of the two we'll be doing the second later today. This will eliminate these shadows even in areas not reporting the problem, but will almost certainly also help prevent less frequent crashes, and possibly some of the FPS issues.

As stated above this issue was happening due to complex areas (those containing many different placeables) but after some investigation I mostly determined it wasn't specific placeables causing this issue, rather the shadows that they cast. This is great news, as it means areas will not need to be stripped down or simplified, and we can prevent this problem happening on our servers.

Further investigation will likely allow the cause of the problem to be located and fixed, so that shadows may be added again at a later time, but honestly - we shouldn't bank on that. Many players barely notice these shadows, so it is no great loss to have them removed.

Fixing only the most problematic areas is also a real option if you want to keep the shadows overall. Arelith is a detailed server, but only about 5% of our areas were reporting this issue, but for ourselves we'll take the NWNX option, as crashes, even when infrequent are certainly not enjoyable.

Thanks to everyone that helped me track this down, especially the player reports which provided a few crucial clues as to the cause, such as this happening when a PC moved too quickly through an area, and that it often affected multiple characters at the same moment.

Of course we cannot fully guarantee this will entirely prevent servers from experiencing these issues, but for Arelith at least we have now had it reported by multiple players that the problem in Cordor has been eliminated (and should be eliminated in all once we send the NWNX plugin live)

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Re: The Intel Graphic Crash & How to Fix It.

Post by White_935 » Wed Oct 10, 2018 3:12 pm

While I only suffer crashes at random, great work :-)
Hopefully this will allow a lot of players to once again enjoy arelith. :-)

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Re: The Intel Graphic Crash & How to Fix It.

Post by DM Symphony » Wed Oct 10, 2018 3:37 pm

Image

Image

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Re: The Intel Graphic Crash & How to Fix It.

Post by naturaly » Wed Oct 10, 2018 4:18 pm

Bravo, you all!

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Re: The Intel Graphic Crash & How to Fix It.

Post by Iceberg » Wed Oct 10, 2018 4:21 pm

Thanks for posting this, and for all the work put in to tracking the issue down. I know there kinds of things aren't easy to find.
Y'all need Lathander.

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Re: The Intel Graphic Crash & How to Fix It.

Post by Irongron » Wed Oct 10, 2018 6:07 pm

Since we've added the plugin I've found that my own extreme frame rate issues when in the Earthkin Village (especially when running the 'Facelift' override), have all but gone. If that's true for everyone else (or at least most) suffering that issue, its really good news.

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Re: The Intel Graphic Crash & How to Fix It.

Post by Anime Sword Fighter » Wed Oct 10, 2018 6:10 pm

Dang!!
Can't wait to be able to play. I recall shadows in GMod, Left 4 Dead and other Valve games (and most games in general) cause issues for the intel laptops I've had in the past (and now)

Good job!!! This is wonderful.

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Re: The Intel Graphic Crash & How to Fix It.

Post by Irongron » Wed Oct 10, 2018 6:33 pm

Coreybush11 wrote:
Wed Oct 10, 2018 6:10 pm
Dang!!
Can't wait to be able to play. I recall shadows in GMod, Left 4 Dead and other Valve games (and most games in general) cause issues for the intel laptops I've had in the past (and now)

Good job!!! This is wonderful.
To be fair its early days yet. We've just 'fixed' this, and need to see what our players report before breaking out the champagne. Still, I'm extremely hopeful based on what we've seen so far.

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Re: The Intel Graphic Crash & How to Fix It.

Post by woodbreeze » Thu Oct 11, 2018 11:58 pm

I've never had issues crashing on this game, but if this update was meant to also correct some of the FPS issues that people were having, then I am still, sadly, experiencing bad frame rate issues with specific maps (most notably, Bendir). Not sure if this is the right place for me to mention this, so I am sorry if it is not.

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Re: The Intel Graphic Crash & How to Fix It.

Post by dysmetria » Fri Oct 12, 2018 2:23 am

I walked across the whole of Cordor for the first time today without crashing. My previous record was doing it in only 3 crashes.

Thanks so much for fixing this for us. I know Beamdog has been looking for the source of this crash since they took the game over, so if you haven't done so already you might want to pass this info on to them.

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Re: The Intel Graphic Crash & How to Fix It.

Post by Ebonstar » Fri Oct 12, 2018 4:24 am

we get our willow trees back yay!!!!
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Re: The Intel Graphic Crash & How to Fix It.

Post by DM Symphony » Fri Oct 12, 2018 9:08 am

dysmetria wrote:
Fri Oct 12, 2018 2:23 am
Thanks so much for fixing this for us. I know Beamdog has been looking for the source of this crash since they took the game over, so if you haven't done so already you might want to pass this info on to them.
Not to dampen the good mood, but, we didn't fix the crash. It's been my long standing belief that the crashes occur when less than adequate coding in the Intel drivers encounters too large of a workload.

Sherincall, one of the community GPU experts and NWNX programmers revealed to several of us early on with some profiling software that NWN's unique shadow system, which I have heard won some awards back in the day for its new approach, runs its calculations in the CPU and takes up as much as half of the CPU workload during every frame draw.

After showing some interest in lessening graphics hardships and pausing my somewhat abstract current shader experimentation and research, I spoke with Irongron and some crashers about potential methods for lessening the client workload when dealing with some of NWN's later and more complicated / less clean model geometry, and we decided to test forgoing the shadow drawing process for the tilesets and placeables. As shown above.

Shadows are still drawn for local light sources, such as tile lights, and vfx like spells and torches, but even with a party of torch holders you won't end up drawing nearly as many shadows as were being drawn on a whole area from the sun and moon diffuse light sources.

This graphics slim down, therefore, will only alter the performance of areas that were outdoors with sun/moon shadows. Fortunately without this step in the frame draw cycle, there's nearly half as many instructions, leading to potentially twice the FPS and fewer, if any, Intel crashes from giving those poor integrated chipsets way more work than Intel likely imagined them being used for.

We did speak with some Beamdog people about the effectiveness of the shadow removal, and the testimony of some of the people who replied here. Beamdog has been considering a band-aid still temp-fix like this one for a while, one idea was to only draw "new" shadows every other frame, leading to half as much shadow work (for all shadows, not just the "main light" shadows we've removed), but this is still something that Beamdog and Intel need to continue pursuing solutions for, and perhaps, the sun/moon shadows need to be replaced with a "modern" friendly OpenGL shadow system today's game-focused graphics cards can (and often do) easily handle, much like what was done with the creation of a new "Shiny Water" system, instead of using the one seen in Bioware's NWN.

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