Original Post
What I am trying to get out of this thread is some information and possibly a fix to what I believe is a probelm with consumer level NVidia based cards and their drivers. I work on applications that span multiple monitors. Each monitor has a basic empty frame from which other windows will be docked. On one of the monitors we have a 2D map that is rendering in OpenGL. On the other frame, we have a 3D scene that is also rendering in OpenGL. One of the dockable windows, rendering in OpenGL as well, displays events that are picked up from the current simulation. The problem I am seeing is that this dockable GL window seems to be throwing GL errors when it transitions from one frmae to the other. Once it does this, the rendering context seems to be corrupted. I guess corrupted would be the right word because all it does is render a black view. When I stretch the dockable window across both monitors, one monitor will render it correctly while the other monitor renders the black view. The applications are running on NVidia GeForce 7800 GT cards. The drivers loaded on the card, when the machines arrived, were 77.77. This driver seems to pose no problems to this GL situation. The application runs perfectly under this driver version. We upgraded the driver version to the latest on their website, expecting more stability and driver bug fixes, to come to the conclusion that something has changed in their driver that is breaking this situation. I would expect that today's level of consumer cards should have no problems with dualview configurations and having OpenGL rendering across both those views. We have gone to some lenghts to see which previous driver versions will not produce this problem, and the driver version mentioned above is the only one that seems to work. We tweaked the driver settings to see if we needed to set something, but all our attempts failed. We have tested this application on all our Quadro based cards, and there is no problem under those. Each Quadro had the latest drivers installed there as well. I know that the Quadro is a more professional based card, but why should the costomer have to pay for a more expensive card when today's GeForce line should be more than capable of handling this situation? Is there anyone who is experiencing this as well? Does anyone have any ideas on how to rectify the problem? I would like to continue using newer drivers so we can have the benifits of performance and stability gains, so telling me to stay with the 77.77 driver version is not a solution. I will be making a mini application that shows our problem. I will post it here to see if anyone else has the same problem. If you have ideas for other places to post, please feel free to let me know. I would like to know if this is a driver bug. Any ideas on where to post to get NVidia's attention? Thanks for the rant and your time. Just to let you know, the application is built under the Microsoft Visuals Studio 2003 Enterprise Edition and runs under Microsoft Windows XP. If there are other technical details that I forgot to mention, let me know. Thanks, Deception