[Paraview] Apparent problems with NVIDIA driver on Linux

[Utkarsh Ayachit]

Thanks for the info, Cory.

Utkarsh

On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 1:51 PM, Cory Quammen <cquammen at cs.unc.edu> wrote:
> I wanted to post some information to hopefully save others time in
> case they are running into rendering oddities while saving an
> animation.
>
> Summary
>
> We have seen rendering problems while generating animations from
> ParaView 3.12.0 64-bit using the NVIDIA 295.20 driver on both Red Hat
> Enterprise Linux Workstation release 6.1 and Scientific Linux release
> 6.1 (Carbon). Both machines on which we observed the problem have
> NVIDIA Quadro 5000 cards. Switching to NVIDIA driver version 275.43 on
> both operating systems seems to have resolved our rendering issues.
> This driver is hard to find from the main NVIDIA driver web site, but
> you can get it here:
>
> http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux-display-amd64-275.43-driver.html
>
> Details
>
> We were trying to generate a simple animation of a time series of
> point particles visualized as glyphs. In several of the frames, a
> subset of the spheres -- all produced from one glyph filter -- would
> appear to switch to the Point representation from the Surface
> representation we wanted. This would only happen for a few
> non-consecutive frames in a 300 frame animation. They were always the
> same frames, so I initially suspected some change in ParaView or VTK
> was leading to this behavior.
>
> After compiling and testing an embarrassing number of different
> commits in ParaView's git history, I narrowed it down to the
> v3.12.0-RC1 tag. The rendering problem didn't appear for any revision
> prior to the v3.12.0-RC1 tag, but it was present at the tag and every
> commit after it. After looking at the source code, there didn't appear
> to be a change to any relevant rendering code in ParaView or VTK, much
> less anything that could have caused this problem.
>
> Giving up on the software side, I decided to try a different NVIDIA
> driver. I had version 295.20 installed when I observed the rendering
> problems. Installing version 275.43 (a more recent driver release, but
> lower driver number, for whatever reason) seems to have resolved the
> problem for ParaView 3.12.0.
>
> I don't have an explanation for why the ParaView revision seems to
> have been involved, other than perhaps the size of the binary somehow
> led to the error in the NVIDIA driver.
>
> Here's hoping I save someone some time,
> Cory
>
> --
> Cory Quammen
> Research Associate
> Department of Computer Science
> The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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