[R70] Huge issues with NVIDIA System Monitor

Hi

I have not played around with contruct for the last betas but when I updated to R70 today I ran into huge problems: Construct crashed everytime I tried to create a new project. So I uninstalled Contruct, made sure the registry folder was gone and reinstalled R70. There's a different behaviour now but the crashes seem to be related to creating/loading/opening/saving projects and/or layouts.

I have made one change since I used Construct 2 last time and that was installing the NVIDIA System Monitor tools. And sure enough, if I close NVIDIA System Monitor Construct seems to be working normal. Running MVIDIA System Monitor causes Construct to become completely unstable and crash to desktop without any error but the normal windows "aplpication stopped working" exception error.

Some kind of conflict related to using hardware accelerated graphics?

I'm running Windows 7 64 Bit.

My Nvidia drivers are 285.62 and I'm running a GTX 460.

Are you sure you have the very latest drivers?

This kind of thing sounds like nVidia's fault to me. I can't think of anything Construct 2 does that would be broken by another app. It's just an ordinary OpenGL application. IMO you should report this to nVidia, I don't know what we could change in Construct 2 to stop other apps breaking it, it's probably better to fix those apps!

I bet this system monitor thing is designed for games and somehow breaks apps. Graphics card makers always have rubbish unstable drivers that never work, it's pretty annoying.

I have the latest driver (according to nvidias update service).

I guess not much can be done but at least this is searchable here if someone have a similar problem. Simply closing the nvidia system monitor before starting Construct prevents the problem.

Construct is the first software to suffer from it though but on the other hand I don't runt much software on this machine.

Just to add some mote info:

There are some strange graphical issues in the layout view in Construct showing when I have any of the nvidia monitoring windows up. They go away if I just hide the nvidia windows (app still running).

When I first start Construct and the tools are running it looks like this:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/44294994/Construct1.PNG

Then I use the keyboard shortcut to hide the nvidia screens (ctrl-alt-s), click in the layout view and it looks normal:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/44294994/Construct1b.PNG

I guess your nvidia tools renders in an openGL context.

When C2 is up and running, it's rendering in there.

This is definetely a "mistake" by the monitoring tools and you really should report those screenshots to NVidia so they can fix this.

Maybe browse their forum/support to see if anything pops up (as far as opengl renderer/context goes).

Yep, definitely looks like the other app is intruding in to Construct 2 and breaking it, not the other way round.

Yeah, the tools they add to the driver installer are absolutely useless.

If you can figure out a way to just install the drivers, I would suggest that.

The monitor tools that are causing this problem are luckily not part of the standard drivers. It's extra software you need to get from nvidia so this will luckily only be a issue for people that have manually installed this extra nvidia stuff.

On a side note: The monitor tools are actually quite useful to monitor and log stuff as you can monitor lots of system values, not only graphic card related. It can also log to a text file. But possibly nvidia don't keep the monitor software up to date with their own drivers. :P

(closing as software problem with nVidia, not a Construct 2 bug)