What Are Your System Specs???

[sculptingman]

Are the Quadro cards on these machines listed as supported cards?

If so, then you should not be experiencing a lot of crashing.... is there a specific tool or thing you are trying to do that seems to bring about the crash?

When FF crashes it usually creates a dump file that you can send to Sensable to help analyze the reasons for the crash.

One other thing... are these the same files that were crashing before? or are they new files you have created.
I have had situations in the past where corrupted files kept crashing no matter what I did... I literally had to export all parts as full res STL and re-import them into new model files to get the crashing to stop occurring.


There is no piece limit that I know of, I have created models that had as many as 3 dozen pieces.... all at high res ( although I would not generally run with all of them turned on. )

[DSMedMod]

MadMike: All of the FreeForm Systems are up to date with the latest Version of FreeForm 10. Unfortunately right now we are unable to move to Version 11 but might in the near future.

Sculptingman: The graphics cards are in the list of supporting cards Sensable shows on there website. There are certain tools that provoke crashing. For example if you are in a sketch, and I hit my shortcut key for new piece without exiting the sketch first, the program will always crash. It seems like if you really program FreeForm with a lot of shortcut keys and use them it crashes.

Dump files are not an option because of the nature of our work we can not send them to Sensable for testing. All of the files would be new, and the problems occur over and over again.

The biggest question i have would be if switching to dual quads would run 10 better or switching to FF11 would run better on our current systems.

Dan

[sculptingman]

I don't think quad cores will make much difference.

As far as I can Tell FF never uses more than 2 except in decimation.

at lower right should be a readout of system memory as a percentage...
In general, what are your files running? Even very high res files should be running around 12 to 15% for maximum stability.

If you can trace crashing to this number jumping up to 28-45 or higher, then you can be sure you are taxing the system memory. In this case, develop a habit of turning off as many pieces as you can, and regularly saving the file to clear history.

If there is no correlation between file size and crashing, then you are probably looking at a glitch in the software.
You should save dump files and forward to Sensable.

You need not worry about sensitive information, the dump file is not a version of the model, it is just a list of program actions and returns.
It will help Sensable determine if there is a bug that you are encountering.



Here's another stupid question... are you sure both cores are running?
when I bought my first IBM intellistation... it had two cores, and FF was running all wonky...
come to find out that only ONE of the cores was actually turned on!
Don't ask my why you would have to actually turn on a second core...
It required a boot modification to get the second core active...


Other things I have seen cause problems... having Transparency turned on with a video card that does not support Open GL 2.1 or better.
I think you should try a Quadro 4500... or better card.