ArchiCAD Crashes My Entire System

[Anonymous]

Ever since I installed the update for Archicad 10 for the Mactel (Mac Pro Duo) Archicad has been crashing the entire system. The problem seems to happen when I am opening Archicad. The problem seems to be randomly intermittent and a bit frustrating. I get the Gray Mac screen telling me that my system has encountered an error and needs to be restarted.

I am wondering if there is any thing I should or can do to fix the problem.

The bigest problem is the intermittent nature of the glitch. I cant seem to figure out if it is a specific file or Archicad in general. I have already reinstalled twice and the problem has not alleviated itself yet.

[Anonymous]

Jptrott,

I'm curious, did your MacPro work its way up to using 2GB of its RAM, but no more, ...then crash?

And now, with your new ATI Radeon card your machine can manage all of its RAM, all 4GB, ...and keep on working?

Do you notice a nice speed-up on some operations with twice the RAM?

So the fix is simple, ...a $350 graphics card. What a relief. And all this time we were thinking that Graphisoft needed to upgrade A-10 for us users of Mactels.

This should be good news for others who are thinking about buying a new Mac.

-Jay S.

[Anonymous]

It kernel panicked the instant archicad opened. or the instant i tried to go to an opengl rendering. When i had more the 2 gbs in it crashed regardless of how much ram was actually being used. As noted below there seems to be either an issue in the nvida driver or on the card itself that has issues or uses some outdated 32-bit code that causes the error when you have more then 2 gb.

Performance has taken a huge jump both with a much better graphics card and full access to 4 gbs of ram. Should have made this move months ago. it was definitely worth the $390

The issue is related to the NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT card. It does not deal with openGL very will and has been crashing on many programs that use opengl.

There are two things that you can do to work around it.
1) believe it or not if you limit your memory down to 2 gigs max (seems to be related to a 32 bit to 64 bit addressing issue which is why if you go down to 2 gigs it works), it mitigates the crashing issue and does not cause the crashes to occur.
2) get a different video card any of the ATI cards seem to be fine.

Nvidia is has always had a bit of an issue with mac drivers and it seems like they are holding true to form.

[Anonymous]

Well, ...we put the Radeon X1900 XT in, in fact we bought TWO and installed both for a whopping 1GB graphics RAM, and zoomed all around a fully landscaped house with a million roof tiles in Open GL.

Then we tried a rendering.

Guess what.

The system climbed to 3.54 GB RAM, ...thought about it for a few minutes, ...and then, ...crashed.

Again.

But it does pull up all the layers of our model (meaning trees, meshes, roof tiles) really fast, and whips around the model really fast.

ArchiCAD crashed, not the whole system. But usually when we restart ArchiCAD the whole system crashes so we've gotten into the habit of just restarting the whole thing instead of letting that happen.

Obviously we have a use for the extra graphics capacity, ...but we sure didn't expect this crash this time.

Ugh.

We were hoping the ATI cards would solve our ArchiCAD problem and liberate all 8GB RAM in our MacPro. Didn't happen.

So we've tried more RAM, better graphics card(s), ...now what?

Ideas?

[Dwight]

how is the hookup with two cards?

[Anonymous]

The computer was using 3.55 GB of ram when Archicad crashed however ArchiCAD was only accessing around 2 GB of it. After restarting the system and repeating the same process of turning on all the layers of the project (landscaping, Roof Tiles, Furnishings, etc......) just to do a second check. This time Archicad didn't crash instead it gave me the warning that there is not enough memory to render the model. At this point the activity monitor was showing over 4.5 GB of free ram. This is not right. We should be able to use more than 2Gb of ram.

I still haven't found a good answer to the 16,778,854,000 TB in the memory column right before it crashes. Has anyone else seen this or have any ideas what it means. See Attached picture.

[Anonymous]

Dwight,

The two cards work, ...fast. We can twirl our model with all trees, roof tiles, people and even the house itself. No hiccups and the Open GL opens quickly. We went with two cards, probably overkill, but have other uses for them besides ArchiCAD.

Unfortunately the model still doesn't render. Advice to add RAM, then to go to an ATI Radeon X1900XT graphics card didn't seem to solve the crash problem. (You do the $$$ math.)

Please see Chris's note.

Ideas?

-Jay S.

[Dwight]

It is probably the tiles taking you over.

Try to render with one lousy sunlight to minimise RAM.

settings attached

[Greg Kmethy]

Since the latest System update (10.4.9) Nvidia cards are supposed to work fine too.

The crash that occurs during rendering is probably unrelated to video cards. However, Lightworks is pretty memory-hungry, so a very detailed model might overrun the 4GB memory limit that the 32-bit nature of ArchiCAD and LightWorks imposes on us. For this reason, it does not make much sense to buy 8 gigs of RAM, unless you plan to run other memory-hungry applications along with ArchiCAD .

Some good reads:

http://archicadwiki.com/LightWorks
http://archicadwiki.com/64-bit
http://archicadwiki.com/Bugs/Archicad_10_causes_system_crash_on_OS_X_%28Intel%29

About the rendering crash, please contact your local tech support with the crash ID

[Anonymous]

gkmethy,

Thank you.

I shall read those references.

Resellers should too.

-Jay S.