Archicad 28 Direct3D Runtime Error

[ETSaum]

Archicad 28 is constantly freezing or crashing, diving a Direct3D / graphics card error.

Archicad 27 and Archicad 26 do not have the same problem.

I've updated graphics drivers, and uninstalled / reinstalled Archicad to no avail.

I get the same error every time; sometimes, it's within seconds of opening the program. Other times, it can take several minutes. But it happens multiple times a day.

'Direct3D Runtime received a Device Removed Message  DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_HUNG'

That's typically an issue with either the graphics card itself or the graphics card's connection the rest of the machine. However, this is the *only* program experiencing the problem, which is usually indicative of a glitch in the program or an incompatibility between the program and the graphics drivers.

These are two of the smallest projects I've ever done in Archicad, and the only two on 28 so far. Archicad 28 appears to be sending conflicting instructions to the GPU, which causes it to hang. No other programs are effected when it happens; in some instances, when it happens in one Archicad 28 file, it doesn't even impact the *other* Archicad 28 file I've got open.

Dell XPS 15 9530 with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU.

Archicad 28.0.2 (3110)

Operating system used: Windows

[Barry Kelly]

@victorbaboi 

Great investigating.

I can confirm that this does indeed trigger the error.

If the design option with the slab is the default (so it does not fade) there is no error.

As soon as the slab is not default and it is faded, this error occurs.

I will tag your post to tech support.

Barry.

[Batu Gezer]

Hello everyone,

I wanted to give an update regarding this issue. We have been investigating this for a while now this is known as DEF-24954 in our database. A few of the issues were driver-related. Due to the problematic 572.xx driver launch from NVIDIA, as some of you also mentioned. This was the initial suspicion, and it was hard to distinguish between these two issues. Until now, we didn't have a way to reproduce. Thank you all for your inputs, and a special thanks to @victorbaboi and @dyer, we can reproduce this issue, and we are investigating it.

In the meantime, you already suggested a few good workarounds:

• Graphic Override for the fills
• Disable Background Update (this could reduce it)
• Disabling the Fade Environment option in the Design Options
• Replacing problematic Vectorial fills with Symbol fills 

(I will update if there are further workarounds we find.)

Not all instances of these errors are related to DEF-24954. From the tickets received and some of your comments, we can see that DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_REMOVED, DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_RESET, and DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_HUNG errors were reported resolved with driver updates or stable drivers in previous instances. And are related to system settings, sleep and hibernate, dGPU being reassigned to iGPU (i.e, laptops going efficiency mode when unplugged) for these reasons, previous suggestions still apply.

A few suggestions to check about this:

• Keeping the driver up to date, if it still crashes, rolling back to a stable driver.
• Unstable overclocking in graphics cards could cause this. Some computers have overclocked this could be disabled to determine if the issue is caused by this.(some manufacturers put profiles for this in some profiles GPU is overclocked)
• Graphics preference could be set to use the High-Performance option. Under System>Display>Graphics, there is an option to set the Graphics preference for Archicad to use a High performance GPU.
• Use the Screen Off option and not Hibernate or Sleep, as this also could result in these errors.

If above mentioned suggestions do not solve your issue, please contact your local support, so we can investigate. Always happy to help!

Kind regards,

Batu

[Frank Schlenke]

Unfortunately we can't confirm that this problem is driver-related (for us). We had a crash today using "576.80". Now, we disabled "background update". We tried every other mentioned suggestion at this point.

[Frank Schlenke]

We had a crash while disabling "background update" today. So we have nothing left to try out anymore. We also did the latest Hotfix 28.2.1 Build 5101 (of course). Might this be a bug in the german version only? Maybe?

[Erik Bjornhage]

Sooo...
...just to bump this one a bit.

Has anyone seen the same problem in AC29?

I'm still getting it in AC28 with all updates installed...

[Paul King]

So far so good in AC29, but also in AC28 since reinstalling windows 11 from scratch (just updating graphic drivers & reinstalling ArchiCAD did not help). 

My testing in AC28 is less robust, as I mostly work in AC29 now. 

I did just recently finish one small pure visualization modelling job in AC28 (only because there was no Datasmith plugin for Twinmotion yet in AC29 until a few days ago) - no errors encountered in that, for what this is worth - but this project was not using design options, elevations or cross sections (that might trigger additional background processes) so probably not the best test.

[Erik Bjornhage]

Have you opened previously problematic AC28 files since reinstalling Win11?

i really don't want to go down the reinstallation route...then I would rather advise the client to skip AC28 altogether.

[Paul King]

Yes, I did, and the error seemed to have gone (or at least it never recurred for me).

I can certainly understand the reluctance to reinstall Windows 11. For me it was a last resort. 

The fact that initially AC28 did not trigger these issues for me, then later started to, made me wonder if the issue was triggered by some incompatible Windows or ArchiCAD update.  Certainly, graphic driver updates make no difference, despite the error message reference to GPU failures.

Other issues I was experiencing at the time with substantial DirectX graphical feedback lagging while editing certain things under AC28 also improved after reinstalling Windows, but not after updating drivers.  They did not completely disappear, but under AC29, they are better again.

Sounds like a worthwhile test to try AC29 before you make any decision about reinstalling Windows.

So far at least, I have not struck any particular new problems with AC29 that were not already in AC28.