App crash on Frame Capture - How to nail it down?

Developer Tools Nsight Graphics
1

Working with one of our applications in Nsight Graphics 2019.3, I find that when I invoke frame capture (“Capture for Live Analysis”) in the Frame Debugger, the app crashes consistently in specific configurations. This is an app that works well when run standalone.

To get a line on this, I tried Debugging Your Application with a Debugger from the Troubleshooting section in the Nsight Graphics User’s Guide and attached the MSVS debugger on app startup. However, running in this attached state, MSVS never observes an app crash (the app appears to continue running in MSVS). Meanwhile, Nsight Graphics frame capture freezes at 77% and never finishes (whereas before the app crashed at 77%).

When the Nsight Graphics frame capture freezes, this is what is displayed in the “Status:” text field of the Nsight Graphics “Capturing frame, please wait…” dialog:

Sending capture request...
Waiting for delimiter...
Preparing for capture...
Capturing function stream...
Building event database...
Processing object mutations...
Starting replay...

If I break the application in MSVS at this point, then it appears that all of the app threads are gone, with the only remaining thread being “Nvda.Graphics.Interception.dll thread”.

I have tried disabling all (and all of the recommended) Frame Debugger options suggested in the Troubleshooting section, without any change in the result.

Before digging into this further, is there a recommended way to deal with this problem?

My setup here:

  • GPU: GTX 1080Ti
  • NV Driver: 430.86
  • SW Config: Nsight Graphics v2019.3.0.0 (Build 26379168), MSVS 2015
  • OS: Win 7 SP1
2

Hi Dark_Photon,

Thank you so much for taking the time to diagnose this issue. It seems like given all the things you tried, there is indeed a bug with Nsight Graphics.

Unfortunately, there isn’t too much for us to go off of here. Would it be possible to share the application you are trying to capture?

Thanks,
Seth

3

Additionally, we did have quite a few fixes in our new version (Coming out next week). So, it might be worth re-trying on Monday rather than having to package a build and go through that hassle.

4

Thanks for the reply! I’ll give the new version a try then (**) and follow-up here with the results.

** Assuming Nsight Graphics works a GeForce 970M laptop (will be OOO next week). Failing that, I’ll retry on the GTX 1080Ti when I return.

5

I re-tried this test with Nsight Graphics 2019.4, and so far this new release seems to have resolved the problems I was seeing with app crashes in frame capture (Frame Debugger → Capture for Live Analysis), particularly with bindless buffer use enabled.

Frame capture may take quite a while (> 3 minutes), but it does succeed now.

Thanks for the improvements.