stephan mantler More »

More on the shader

I’ve just taken a look at the FX Shader Compiler’s output for the broken shader, and what changes when I comment a few lines so that it doesn’t crash my machine any more… and figured out what the problem is. Here’s a fairly minimal shader that crashes my machine: PixelShader = asm { ps_3_0 defi i0, 100,0,0,0 def c0, 0.01, [...]

…33 System Crashes Later…

Since the shader I crashed my system with does so extremely reliably, I decided to submit it as a bug report to NVIDIA. Which is a bit problematic, because this usually requires a ‘repro case’, ie. a piece of code which can reproduce the problem as repeatably as possible. Repeatability is easy - my shader [...]

What you really don’t want to see a few hours before a deadline

…is a complete crash of your development system, right back to the BIOS self-test (no blue screen), followed by disk corruption errors that keep scrolling over your screen for several hours. Well, that pretty much put the nail in the coffin of our submission plans, and we decided to go for the next deadline (which is, [...]