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Rainmeter closes after Graphic card update.

Report bugs with the Rainmeter application and suggest features.
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kyriakos876
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Rainmeter closes after Graphic card update.

Post by kyriakos876 »

I don't know if this is Hardware-acceleration related, but after I installed the new update in my graphics card, rainmeter closed/crashed. I don't think that this used to be a thing before... No big deal obviously because all I had to was just run Rainmeter.exe again, just thought I'd report it. :confused:
Rainmeter 4.3.0.3260 beta (64-bit)
Language: English (1033)
Build time: 2018-10-16 8:38:34
Commit Hash: c99884c7
Windows 10 Pro 1809 64-bit (build 17763) - English (1033)
Path: C:\Program Files\Rainmeter\
SkinPath: C:\Users\Kyria\Documents\Rainmeter\Skins\
SettingsPath: C:\Users\Kyria\AppData\Roaming\Rainmeter\
IniFile: C:\Users\Kyria\AppData\Roaming\Rainmeter\Rainmeter.ini
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jsmorley
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Re: Rainmeter closes after Graphic card update.

Post by jsmorley »

Yep, does it for me as well, every time my nVIDA drivers are updated.
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kyriakos876
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Re: Rainmeter closes after Graphic card update.

Post by kyriakos876 »

jsmorley wrote: November 8th, 2018, 6:40 pm Yep, does it for me as well, every time my nVIDA drivers are updated.
By everytime you mean even with later Rainmeter versions that didn't support HW/AC?
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siliconman01
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Re: Rainmeter closes after Graphic card update.

Post by siliconman01 »

Yep, crashes on my systems when I update my nvidia drivers to the latest version....just happened again on V417.01. Does it on 3 different systems with different models of Nvidia cards. Has been doing this since Nvidia drivers moved into the 400 series of drivers.
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theAzack9
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Re: Rainmeter closes after Graphic card update.

Post by theAzack9 »

To give some minor explanation on this... (Warning, possible technical speak...)

I can not say how rainmeter 4.2 and earlier handles this as i didn't have as much to do with the GDI+ backend.

As for the new Direct2D based rendering might the graphics card still be used, even with HWA turned off. It won't be used for the rendering itself, but certain kinds of resources (image processing, offscreen surfaces or similar stuff) might still be offloaded to the GPU. This means that when the graphics card updates and restarts, then all the resources rainmeter depends on will suddenly be released, which causes undefined behaviour, and possibly a crash.

There are ways to handle it more gracefully and i do want to look into it in the future, but it is something that is a bit tricky to test since i need to somehow restart the graphics driver. ;) It is something that will be a bit tricky to look into, but as the 4.3 beta continues, is it something i hope we will be able to fix.
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jsmorley
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Re: Rainmeter closes after Graphic card update.

Post by jsmorley »

I don't see this as a terribly high priority. My HexChat client crashes when I install nVidia drivers as well. I'm sure it's due to the point where nVidia switches to some generic driver while it replaces the actual one.

This is what comes of all the years of whining about how you had to restart your PC when it was done installing drivers. Be careful what you wish for...
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kyriakos876
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Re: Rainmeter closes after Graphic card update.

Post by kyriakos876 »

theAzack9 wrote: November 27th, 2018, 10:52 am...but it is something that is a bit tricky to test since i need to somehow restart the graphics driver...
Don't quote me on this one, but my understanding is that simply restarting the graphics driver won't do the trick... You can actually do that by pressing Win+Ctrl+Shift+B (works for Windows 8+) but you won't get the crash. This is probably because when a Nvidia update happens, VRAM is cleared, but with a restart it isn't. So that's what you should probably try and figure how to do. Clear the VRAM. (Thus the solution could be something related to how Rainmeter utilizes/ relies on VRAM)

Now, again, I ain't no expert, so I wrote the above with the thought that Hardware acceleration is the cause. (I, personally, don't think I was experiencing this crash, say, one year ago.)

The obvious way to test it would be to uninstall and reinstall the driver, but I don't know how healthy this is going to be for your GPU.
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kyriakos876
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Re: Rainmeter closes after Graphic card update.

Post by kyriakos876 »

But as Jsmorley said above, this isn't something vital. Crashing once a month isn't something crazy... If only everything would crash as little as once a month... I only posted this to be sure something wasn't wrong with my system... Didn't really care that I had to click Rainmeter.exe to run it again.
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jsmorley
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Re: Rainmeter closes after Graphic card update.

Post by jsmorley »

kyriakos876 wrote: November 27th, 2018, 12:49 pm But as Jsmorley said above, this isn't something vital. Crashing once a month isn't something crazy... If only everything would crash as little as once a month... I only posted this to be sure something wasn't wrong with my system... Didn't really care that I had to click Rainmeter.exe to run it again.
What I do is close Rainmeter and HexChat, before I start the driver upgrade. Then when it is done, I restart my PC. I do it this way as I don't really want the crashing of the applications generating a lot of Windows error log or memory dump stuff that I then have to clean up with DiskClean later, due to my anal-retentive nature.

Speaking of anal-retentive, be aware that nVidia stores and keeps all the different versions of the drivers it downloads and installs, and that can really eat up some hard drive space over time. These are like 500MB each. This can be cleaned up by going to C:\ProgramData\NVIDIA Corporation\Downloader, and deleting all folders that have just a long hash number as the folder name.
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kyriakos876
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Re: Rainmeter closes after Graphic card update.

Post by kyriakos876 »

Wow... Zero respect for SSD owners... Thanks for that info. I'll start deleting as soon as I'm back home. I'll check if I can change the path, which I highly doubt. As for restarting, that's probably a good idea after any driver update.