I have a brand new HP laptop, and a brand new copy of ViaCAD 2D v9, and the two won’t run together. Within a minute of starting to use ViaCAD, I get a couple of “Intel HD Graphics Display Driver has stopped responding and has recovered” errors, the ViaCAD drawing background goes black, and ViaCAD often then crashes when trying to continue (e.g. saving the graphics file).

PunchCAD Tech Support says it’s a graphics card issue – not their problem. HP Support tries to help: makes sure the latest graphics drivers are loaded, then reloads Windows, then replaces the whole laptop. Problem still persists.

There are numerous discussions online of problems with this symptom (“driver stopped responding ...”) running various games, etc, and the solutions being posted are many and varied – and none of them have yet worked for me. But my problem is specific to ViaCAD, and I’m hoping that there is a specific solution or workaround that other ViaCAD users may have come across? Or do I just dump ViaCAD (or HP) – but surely ViaCAD should be able to run on a well-spec’d mainstream modern laptop?

Laptop specs are:
• Intel i7-6700HQ processor
• 8GB RAM
• Windows 10 (64-bit)
• Intel HD Graphics 530 (driver version 20.19.15.460 – NB this is an HP mod of the Intel driver))
• NVidia GeForce GTX 950M (driver version 10.18.13.5894)
• 100G SSD + 1TB HDD

[PS It sounds like a graphics driver problem, but it’s interesting that ViaCAD hits this repeatedly, while other graphics programs do not. And I also note that my old ViaCAD v7 running on Windows 7 on my old Dell laptop would also produce an error/warning message each time ViaCAD started up (“The color scheme has been changed to Windows Basic – your program is incompatible with certain parts of Windows...”). Is ViaCAD pushing the boundaries of Windows features?]

Thanks for any help!!

Rob

Dear RobHol,
I've had the same problem when I bought Shark v9 in 2015. My graphic driver stopped responding and no support could help me, then I did two steps and software started to work correctly:

1. I uninstalled Geforce Experience software - it is for gaming and it is a lot of problems with this. You don't need this for a CAD softwares.
2. I changed default settings in Nvidia controll panel - see the jpg attached. Unfortunately I have only polish language installed, but the order should be the same, and google translate tool should help :-) I marked also the position I changed.

If it would not help try to switch off Intel basic card in your device manager and work with Nvidia only.

Have a nice day
Magicart

I have seen the flashing screen, whiteouts and blackouts on both of my systems, one has the dual graphics and the other has Nvidia graphics only.
Try modelling with images in a file for around 90 minutes and see if your screen flashes, the images disappear and then you are left with blank images, this happens on both of my systems in V8 and V9.
It would be interesting to see if others can recreate this but you have to do 90 minutes of modelling, I think it will happen way before that though.

more or less all OpenGL-based 3D CAD modelers (not graphics programs) as Shark/ViaCAD do require a capable = dedicated video card as e.g. a nVidia GeForce GT(X). The integrated intel HD/Iris video subsystem is good for office/internet/video but typically slow and without a mature OpenGL support which therefore may lead to screen artefacts or driver crashes etc.

This is getting worse with the OGL support of the 64-bit drivers sothat 64-bit applications are regularly affected more often than the same software as a 32-bit version (see SketchUp).

3D CAD systems using the MS DirectX/Direct3D API as e.g. Autodesk products or Alibre (*iirc*) might not be affected by this display output issue (btw, raster export and printing can be affected too).

Edited by user Thursday, June 2, 2016 6:20:26 AM(UTC)  | Reason: typo

Craig

The only reference to "use vertex arrays" in the ViaCAD User Guide is in the View / ShadeOptions menu - and that isn't available on ViaCAD 2D. Is there some other reference to it elsewhere?

Rob

No cable problems - I'm still using the laptop display (to minimise any complications).

I tried disabling each of the Intel and NVIDIA units via the NVIDIA control panel, without improvement. I've also just tried disabling the Intel driver via the Device Manager pages. Don't know why that should be any different, but I couldn't immediately fail it. Will try that further ...

Regards

Rob

(Am about to go away for a week, so won't be on the air for a while. Will post any significant successes! Thanks for your help!!)

Thanks for all the advice, guys. None of it solved my problems completely, but (with lots of help from HP, including a replacement laptop) we found a newer (i.e. beta) version of the video drivers solved the problem - for now.

Thanks again

Rob