White Screen on Main PixInsight Window

jliu

Active member
There is an apparent conflict between my Nvidia driver and PixInsight. Occasionally and randomly, the main Pixinsight screen window would completely white out after I click on one of the sub windows I'm working on. I cannot then access any images I'm working on, although I can make menu items pop-up. My only recourse is to close PixInsight and start it again. This white screen issue has not arisen on any other program, and other programs that I may have active run normally. Please advise. Thanks.

OS: Windows 10 Pro, version 2004, OS build 19041.329
Graphics Card: GeForce RTX 2080 Super
Video Driver: Nvidia 451.48
PC Processor: AMD Ryzen 9 3950x 16-core running at 3.5 GHz

Jack

IMG_3417 reduced.jpg
 
I doubt this is something PixInsight can deal with as it is a graphics issue...but just as a data point..I have experienced this as well. I just find the drop down if I need to save something and restart the program. For whatever reason, in my case the white screen only occurs when the PI program is in the background (e.g. I am lookin at my web browser). I haven't had this occur when I am actually using it actively. That being said, I have not experienced it in a while now. Usually the program has to have been open for many hours.

-adam
 
I doubt this is something PixInsight can deal with as it is a graphics issue...but just as a data point..I have experienced this as well. I just find the drop down if I need to save something and restart the program. For whatever reason, in my case the white screen only occurs when the PI program is in the background (e.g. I am lookin at my web browser). I haven't had this occur when I am actually using it actively. That being said, I have not experienced it in a while now. Usually the program has to have been open for many hours.

-adam
Adam, thanks for sharing your experience. Do you also have a graphics card, and is it a Nvidia card as well? I also tried increasing the number of PixInsight dedicated swap folders from 1 to 8, but the white screen behavior remains. PixInsight runs fine on my other PC running Windows 7. I suspect there may be a memory leak somewhere..

Jack
 
Adam, thanks for sharing your experience. Do you also have a graphics card, and is it a Nvidia card as well? I also tried increasing the number of PixInsight dedicated swap folders from 1 to 8, but the white screen behavior remains. PixInsight runs fine on my other PC running Windows 7. I suspect there may be a memory leak somewhere..

Jack
Yes... NVidia.
 
Here is an update. I purposely opened PixInsight, loaded a previous xisf file, and just left the program running in the background while doing other things on the computer. Several hours later (about 5 hrs), I went back to the program, tried to run a script, and immediately got the white screen. I restarted PixInsight, loaded the file, ran the script and other processes normally. Remarkably, I also found that when I tried to get back on this forum to write this update, I had to enter my user ID and password again although I was supposed to be permanantly logged on. I suspect the white screen crash had something to do with it.

Jack
 
I may have found the source of the white screen PixInsight crash. I discovered NVIDIA has a GPU monitoring app, a screen capture of which is attached. I noticed that both Pixinsight and a program called icloudphotos.exe run on the GPU. The latter program from Apple downloads new photos taken with my linked Apple devices and is linked to iCloud. It may be the two programs conflict if icloudphotos.exe tries to download a new image, corrupting memory being used by PixInsight. I removed icloudphotos.exe from the system startup list so it normally doesn’t run on the GPU. After doing so, PixInsight seems stable even after several hours of use. More time will be needed to see if the stability lasts. I will post an update as appropriate.
Capture.JPG
 
that is interesting - it means that icloudphotos.exe must have a window open somewhere (but perhaps hidden). i don't think these are processes that are running on the GPU per-se, but they are processes for which the GPU is doing the screen compositing (meaning, drawing windows, figuring out what window is in front of the others, etc.)

it could still be a bug in the GPU driver, but the bug is triggered by however icloudphotos.exe is interacting with the GPU.

rob
 
that is interesting - it means that icloudphotos.exe must have a window open somewhere (but perhaps hidden). i don't think these are processes that are running on the GPU per-se, but they are processes for which the GPU is doing the screen compositing (meaning, drawing windows, figuring out what window is in front of the others, etc.)

it could still be a bug in the GPU driver, but the bug is triggered by however icloudphotos.exe is interacting with the GPU.

rob
Yes, I suspect the bug(s) are still lurking in the driver regarding how it manages different apps contending for GPU processes. I am especially wary of the Windows 10 Photo app. Until I installed the latest NVIDIA driver, the computer system would gradually slow the system down (I suspect a memory leak) and ultimately stop with the BSOD if I used a mix of PixInsight, Photo, and Photoshop. The latest driver at least allowed all other apps run normally except for the white screen issue in PixInsight that I believe I now know how to manage. I now always keep the GPU Monitor app running so I can manage the processes accessing the GPU.

Jack
 
Late to this, but I'm experiencing this issue (screen goes entirely white) with increased frequency. I find it strange that PI has been "absolved" so easily here, as this problem doesn't occur with any other apps that I use. There should at the very least be some way for PI to "repaint" itself, even though it doesn't think it needs to.
 
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