fresh thread: OSX, stutter/crash issues, RESOLVED

[RootlessAgrarian]

Thanks to the folks who have helpfully discussed my difficulties with (very) frequent game crashes rendering ETS2 unplayable in certain areas. I thought I would start a fresh thread because my test results seem to span 2 topics: SEGV/ABRT crashes w/ NVIDIA GPU on OSX, and stutter/lag in specific map areas. I'm pretty sure they are the same issue, so bringing them together here.

Here's the first hard data point. I created a "vanilla" profile with no mods whatsoever and another profile with only PM 2.01, no other mods. Not even TCP. Then I drove a stretch of highway I have had problems with before: from Osnabruck past Bremen, NE bound. If I drove this stretch with no PM loaded, I got 50+ fps, perfectly smooth animation, no glitches, no crashes. Could drive at 120+ kph and still no hiccups. If I used the PM-enabled profile and drive that same stretch, my fps went down to 30 average and eventually (nearer to Bremen) to 20, then 11, then CRASH (one of: SEGV or ABRT, in the NVIDIA driver). So... PM definitely "the problem" as far as these SEGV and ABRT crashes I have been seeing, not any other mods I might be carrying around with me. Other packs and modders officially exonerated

Second hard data point: enabled minicon and fps display. I'd really like to know (please!) what all the other numbers mean on this status bar, but here is a quick three-part comparison: healthy, nonjittery normal driving, then slightly troubled (fps going yellow), then just pre-crash (fps in red and down to 10 or 11, wild stuttering).



Highlighting reflects the colours of text in the minicon status bar. These numbers are taken from screenshots I made with minicon active, at various places. Please can someone tell me what dc and dc/s are, because they are often red and this probably would be useful information if I knew what they mean.

Third hard data point: I found a very specific place on the map where my GPU simply gives up and dies, reliably, within a few seconds of starting gameplay.

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gas station from hell ; [27/03/2016  22:07] (sec-0001-0007);-1637.75;8.3432;-24431.5

This is a big multi-pump gas station with several trucks parked around it. I found that I could not even drive to the pump and away again w/o crashing. FPS was down to 10 or 11 very quickly. If I used the chase camera rather than cab view, I could barely manoeuvre around the forecourt. So this is an example of an extremely specific map location that just kills my GPU, every time! But the tc is not consistently higher than a few other places that I have driven through without ill effects.

So, I can reduce my overall game quality to Medium... which iirc makes this gas station navigable (I will confirm this in the next series of comparison tests) but then I get unnecessarily high frame rates in normal driving (60, 70) and a far less attractive game -- which is disappointing to play when I know how awesome the graphics can be! (and I'm in it for the pretty scenery).

So I would say I have two issues to raise...

One is that there appear to be "hot spots" on the map which are so much more challenging than the rest of the map that one has to stop gameplay and adjust graphics parameters before proceeding (or live with a degraded video quality throughout). I have seen tc of almost 4 mio in one location

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3.8 3.9 MIO TC ; [26/03/2016  21:41] (sec-0001-0004);-83.9719;19.7667;-15456.3

but even if we compare 2 areas just over 2 mio tc, one can be just fine and the other can be an fps-killer. So there is more to it than just tc.

Two: these hot spots for some reason actually crash my game, almost invariably in the NVIDIA GeForce driver... which I am guessing is a bug of some kind in the OpenGL/OSX code of the core or in PM. I say this only because I can thrash the GPU with another very demanding 3d engine (XPLANE 10) and though the frame rate drops and the game stutters, I never get a crash. Also, I note that while playing ETS2 the GPU temperature never gets above 70 (max logged, 72) C, which indicates to me that it's not actually overworked. Main CPU ditto, not getting hot. I have 16GB RAM and a hybrid SSD, no competing processes. I don't think it's a resource bottleneck...

Game logs galore are posted and discussed in previous thread,

Jonkoping area stutter/crash: http://www.promods.net/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=11838

including strange stuff like "fps goes to 11, crash, restart, fps is fine now in same location". I think the locations I've mentioned above, however, are totally reproducible crash-inducers.

I am not sure whether this problem should be reported to SCS as an issue with the OSX port of the Prism3D core, or here as a PM issue. What I'll be doing next (tedious work) is testing every adjustable parameter in video quality (from Medium to High) until I find out which specific parameters trigger the vulnerability to, e.g. the gas station from hell (a nice, reliable test case). I will also (gulp) install and test the NVIDIA "gaming drivers" available on their web site, which allegedly are higher-performance than those shipped with WinDoze or OSX.

What I ask, please, from older and wiser heads here... is a complete explanation of the debug data in the minicon fps status bar. I did find an older thread on this topic but only about half the values were discussed. If I understood all those abbreviated labels, I might have a better shot at figuring out what is wrong and how to address it. Meanwhile, I'm back in Iceland... where the tc is fairly consistent, I almost never crash, and the scenery is so awesome I just keep looking for jobs that will take me back there

[jesse01]

Interesting, I am having a different problem but I am following your findings with different game modes and the GPU/CPU problems.
My game freezes at the screen were you select your headquarters after making a new profile. When I check my CPU data after the game started freezing it shows 100% CPU usage continuously. When I close the game and look at the game.log nothing game crashing can be found, it auto-saved and stopped doing (and/or logging) anything.

Tried running it in other game modes, with and without mods, including promods, 3 fresh installs of different game versions, but no change in the game.log, that's why I am thinking my problem could be hardware related, I might be wrong but I simply don't know what else could be causing problems.

[penguinaz]

I don't have these issues on my Mac. Are you using the Mac version on Steam? Are you using Promods 2.01 + ETS2 1.22?

You might also want to wait to check out Promods 2.02 + ETS2 1.23, since 1.23 fixes some OpenGL issues.

[RootlessAgrarian]

@penguinaz

I don't have these issues on my Mac. Are you using the Mac version on Steam? Are you using Promods 2.01 + ETS2 1.22?

Steam, yes, that is where I bought my ETS2 and where I get my updates. PM 2.01 and ETS2 1.22, yes.

My sytem: 2013 21.5in iMac, 3.1GHz i7, El Capitan 10.11.4, 16 GB main mem, 1TB hybrid SSD/PCI disk, NVIDIA GeForce GT750M:

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Chipset Model:	NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M
  Type:	GPU
  Bus:	PCIe
  PCIe Lane Width:	x16
  VRAM (Total):	1024 MB
  Vendor:	NVIDIA (0x10de)
  Device ID:	0x0fe9
  Revision ID:	0x00a2
  ROM Revision:	3762
  Displays:
iMac:
  Display Type:	LCD
  Resolution:	1920 x 1080
  Pixel Depth:	32-Bit Color (ARGB8888)
  Main Display:	Yes
  Mirror:	Off
  Online:	Yes
  Built-In:	Yes
SwitchResX4 - LG ULTRAWIDE:
  Resolution:	2560 x 1080 @ 60 Hz
  Pixel Depth:	32-Bit Color (ARGB8888)
  Mirror:	Off
  Online:	Yes
  Rotation:	Supported
  Television:	Yes

I am overclocking my NVIDIA driver to support the LG Ultra Wide Screen HDMI monitor, using the mac-pixel-clock patch by Floris Fredrikze and SwitchResX. Seems to work just fine on all other apps.

May I ask what rev of OSX you are running, which year/model iMac or laptop, which graphics card, which display(s), your basic system config, video driver? What ETS2 quality setting(s)? It's very reassuring to know that an OSX version is working correctly! now the mystery is, why is my version not working correctly?

You might also want to wait to check out Promods 2.02 + ETS2 1.23, since 1.23 fixes some OpenGL issues.

I have been wary of ETS2 1.23 beta after hearing some scary stories from early open beta testers, but as soon as it's stable I will install. I have a lot of history with the OpenGL font trashing bug and would love to see that one fixed!

PS doesn't anyone know what those minicon values mean? it puzzles me f'rexample that VM is always zero. is that video mem, as in on the graphics card? shouldn't the game be using some of it? or is it system vm, in which case it could be zero because I have enough physical mem for the game image? inquiring minds would really like to know a whole lot more...

[Josh0]

RootlessAgrarian,

You can put people's text in a quote box, rather than highlighting it with a color: Quoting text in replies

I am overclocking my NVIDIA driver to support the LG Ultra Wide Screen HDMI monitor, using the mac-pixel-clock patch by Floris Fredrikze and SwitchResX. Seems to work just fine on all other apps.

Overclocking? I was not aware of this... now I am required to ask, do you experience these crashes when not overclocking?

PS doesn't anyone know what those minicon values mean? it puzzles me f'rexample that VM is always zero. is that video mem, as in on the graphics card? shouldn't the game be using some of it? or is it system vm, in which case it could be zero because I have enough physical mem for the game image? inquiring minds would really like to know a whole lot more...

I'm fairly certain "vm" is Virtual Memory. With enough RAM installed, you'll never use any Virtual Memory. "ms" is milliseconds, I think it is just the inverse of fps. I would bet the "tex" and/or "vbo" fields have to do with texture memory (video memory). And I seem to recall (but I could be mistaken) that the "tex" field only has non-zero values in DirectX mode, as if it does not record properly in OpenGL mode.

[RootlessAgrarian]

Well I may not be using the term "overclocking" correctly, not being a driver or graphics whiz. OSX is a bit stupid (wilfully so?) about non-Apple monitors, HDMI out, etc. You can read online a lot of wailing from OSX users -- such as myself -- who bought UW HDMI displays, usually for gaming, only to find that OSX simply would not configure any monitor to be 2560x1080 and OSX version of the NVIDIA driver would not let you set the correct clock rate to refresh that res. Enter SwitchResX, which allows you to configure your own (not limited to Apple product) monitor resolutions, and Floris's patch which gets around the (artificial, apparently) clock limitation in the NVIDIA driver.

And now for the bad (?) news... I finally got XPLANE10 to segv after about 10 minutes of thrashing the GPU -- highest graphic quality, anti-aliasing, zillions of 3d objects etc. It limped along at 10fps most of that time, painful to watch, but hung in there way longer than ETS2 ever has (and each still frame was beautifully rendered too!)... but finally to my surprise, it took a dive. I have pushed it that hard before but I guess not for long enough. GPU did not overheat. SEGV, boom, very similar to ETS2 crash. So now this fresh data point has changed my perspective: I suspect the driver, and not just because of the patch. Googling around a bit w/my new suspicions I find there is some circumstantial (or at least hearsay) evidence against OSX NVIDIA driver:

https://support.zwift.com/hc/en-us/arti ... ndom-crash

(this is not the only report of bugginess in the Apple version of this driver). So I am gearing up to try the NVIDIA "web driver" -- the replacement for Apple's version -- which is said to be better. one can only hope.

So I won't bother with any more ETS2 test runs until I get the new driver installed and tested. Apologies for having led everyone down what now looks like a dud trail. Josh0's success in eliminating segv flavour #1 (Jobs Market) by tweaking PM mod predisposed me to believe that all in-game segvs must be ETS2/PM related. Looks like that was a bad assumption...

Anyhow, to cheer myself up I drove across Iceland tonight for an entire hour w/ High quality graphics, with not one glitch or crash! Still my favourite part of the map! Spectacular. If loading PM makes my game crash, well ya know, surely I am going to whine and try to fix it... but imho it's worth all the crashing and diagnostic confusion just to have Iceland This time there was mist on the lakes (wow) and active volcanic vents (complete with tourists). Whoever built Iceland (Slartibartfast?) gets major kudos from me (again).

I am still curious to hear about penguinaz' Mac setup. If it's not an NVIDIA GeForce GPU then I'd consider that somewhat corroborating evidence

[RootlessAgrarian]

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01:37:58.340 : Game has been auto-saved.
01:37:58.482 : quit

This is a red-letter day for my ETS gameplay. This is a first. That 1h37m you see above in the game log is the longest this game has stayed up EVER. No SIGSEGV, no SIGABRT, no psychedelic hangs. I drove from Europoort way down to Budapest, without any game crashes.

Earlier today I installed the NVIDIA "web driver" (nothing to do with http, you download it from their web site) for my rev of El Capitan and my hardware. If you have an Apple laptop or desktop machine -- or Hackintosh -- with compatible NVIDIA hardware, here's the link:

http://www.macvidcards.com/drivers.html

The pkg installer does not overwrite the stock Apple driver. It installs it alongside, plus a Preferences pane that lets you switch back and forth from stock to NVIDIA driver. I heartily recommend this driver for any OSX user with NVIDIA/GeForce GPU who has had any crashing issues with ETS2. Also, the NVIDIA driver is not crippled like the Apple version: it will support ultrawide monitors, so you don't need the mac-pixel-patch (though you will need IOKit patch I believe). I tested it by loading up XPLANE10: choose high graphical quality and fly around over a major city (tens of thousands of 3d objects with shading, texture etc). I bogged the GPU down to 8fps but the game never crashed, even after 12 minutes of this. So this evening I fired up ETS and you see the result above: I think I could run the game for hours w/no crashes.

Now, when I hit hot spots (I think these must be a ProMods issue as I never see them when running vanilla ETS2), I see jittering and stuttering (both audio and video) but the game does not crash! I can jitter my way through the bad spot and continue my journey without repeated segvs and restarts and loss of drive time and hair tearing. Switching to outside camera helps to raise fps, though it's a bit disorienting. One thing I would really like to set up in my controls file is a single keystroke that would switch to bumper or roof cam and turn on both inset wing mirrors, for quickly adapting to these troubled areas of the map. I'm not sure how to do it, but it's next on my ETS2 project list.

Here is a list of hot spots I hit on the way:

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 hot spot ; [29/03/2016  20:36] (sec+0000-0008);608.287;5.08133;-31660.2
 hot spot ; [29/03/2016  21:03] (sec+0002-0003);8918.75;43.4163;-11820.2
 hot spot ; [29/03/2016  21:07] (sec+0002-0003);8807.81;32.3597;-8823.07
 hot spot ; [29/03/2016  21:08] (sec+0002-0003);9389.03;32.5393;-8766.69
 hot spot ; [29/03/2016  21:09] (sec+0002-0003);10591.9;32.4429;-8752
 hot spot ; [29/03/2016  21:09] (sec+0002-0003);10956;30.0681;-8599.54
 hot spot and very bouncy ; [29/03/2016  21:16] (sec+0004-0002);17020.5;30.2487;-4481.57

I am still very puzzled about what makes a spot so hot that my GPU can't keep up. Several of these were nothing more interesting than freeway interchanges -- no fancy architecture, not that many AIs around, not a very interesting visual field really. And yet my GPU suddenly staggered -- 15fps or worse until I got out of the Twilight Zone. Maybe if we all report these mysterious GPU-killer locations on the map, their nature will become obvious and they'll get fixed.

Thanks again all (and esp to Josh0 who patiently helped me with the SIGSEGV and SIGABRT crash logs). One happy virtual truck driver here.

[penguinaz]

Glad it works for you now

I have a nVidia 650m (1GB vRAM) GPU in my macbook pro.