Well, good news for Dolphin, bad news for me. Even DOOM gives me the exact same BSOD when switching to Vulkan. It's clearly something with the drivers and Windows 7.
Is there anyone on Nvidia and Windows 7 who is able to use Vulkan without fault? I've seen a few different kinds of BSODs: PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA, an attempt to write to read only memory was made, IRQL errors etc. All from the same trigger of going to fullscreen under Vulkan.
Update:
Solved the blue screen. The cause was from not using Aero and having no DWM compositor active.
However this now returns me to my old woes that were never resolved where after ending the Vulkan renderer, the entire system freezes up and only the mouse position updates requiring a system reset at the case.
All it takes is one person with Nvidia and Windows 7 to confirm this is an isolated situation and it should work. Please, if anyone has the time and hardware please test this for me. I am losing my mind trying to figure this one out.
Scratch it all. I've finally got a handle on this whole situation. I'll try to keep things simple here.
1) BSOD is definitively caused by using a "classic" Windows theme and disabling Aero. This is not a problem on 8 and up because you cannot disable the DWM on these operating systems. Do not use Vulkan without Aero on 7. You will not be a happy camper.
2) After fresh installing Windows 7 SP1, defer GPU driver install until later on after all major Windows updates and components (.NET frameworks, Visual C++ redistributables, etc) are all fully installed and up to date. Installing GPU drivers too early can effectively corrupt them and lead to major problems.
Now that I have Aero enabled and did a DDU -> reinstall of Nvidia drivers, Vulkan is running flawlessly. No more BSOD, no more system freezes after exiting. It sucks that I still need to keep Aero on in order to use an API without a catastrophic failure, but that's on the Nvidia drivers, not you guys. Just glad this whole thing is behind me and I can relax and use Windows 7 in peace. Hopefully this helps someone in the future if they run into the same problems.
(11-26-2017, 01:45 PM)AnyOldName3 Wrote: [ -> ]NVidia's drivers have never really deserved their good reputation. As an extreme example, AMD never pushed an update that permanently bricked a card, but NVidia has done it more than once. When there's a cock-up, there's usually a hotfix within a week, though, so I'd try updating or rolling back or something to see if that helps.
AMD did push a driver update that capped fan speeds at 10%, frying PCB’s. I’d called that a brick considering they had to issue replacements.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/9823/amd-releasing-new-crimson-drivers-for-gpu-fan-issue
That was a report on amd pushing an update to fix the issue, after acknowledging cards were permanently fried. So I would not say nvidia fares much worse in that regard.
(11-26-2017, 10:26 PM)DaRkL3AD3R Wrote: [ -> ]Scratch it all. I've finally got a handle on this whole situation. I'll try to keep things simple here.
1) BSOD is definitively caused by using a "classic" Windows theme and disabling Aero. This is not a problem on 8 and up because you cannot disable the DWM on these operating systems. Do not use Vulkan without Aero on 7. You will not be a happy camper.
2) After fresh installing Windows 7 SP1, defer GPU driver install until later on after all major Windows updates and components (.NET frameworks, Visual C++ redistributables, etc) are all fully installed and up to date. Installing GPU drivers too early can effectively corrupt them and lead to major problems.
Now that I have Aero enabled and did a DDU -> reinstall of Nvidia drivers, Vulkan is running flawlessly. No more BSOD, no more system freezes after exiting. It sucks that I still need to keep Aero on in order to use an API without a catastrophic failure, but that's on the Nvidia drivers, not you guys. Just glad this whole thing is behind me and I can relax and use Windows 7 in peace. Hopefully this helps someone in the future if they run into the same problems.
Ha! good to know thanks for the heads up, I am running on w7 using Vulkan and a gtx760.
Is there some specific Windows 7 issues I'm not aware of? I'm back to getting BSOD issues ONLY with Dolphin and Vulkan. I can use Vulkan just fine on PPSSPP, RPCS3 and DOOM without any crashes or issues. It is now only Dolphin that has these problems. Right now the most notable issue is going from windowed -> fullscreen -> windowed -> fullscreen. It makes the game render black. When I stop emulation, sometimes I blue screen. I thought I had all this sorted, but it seems I was wrong. Dolphin + Windows 7 + Vulkan = a mess.
(06-04-2018, 12:55 PM)DaRkL3AD3R Wrote: [ -> ]Is there some specific Windows 7 issues I'm not aware of? I'm back to getting BSOD issues ONLY with Dolphin and Vulkan. I can use Vulkan just fine on PPSSPP, RPCS3 and DOOM without any crashes or issues. It is now only Dolphin that has these problems. Right now the most notable issue is going from windowed -> fullscreen -> windowed -> fullscreen. It makes the game render black. When I stop emulation, sometimes I blue screen. I thought I had all this sorted, but it seems I was wrong. Dolphin + Windows 7 + Vulkan = a mess.
All bluescreens *must* be a driver issue. No matter what the user app does, the driver must *not* cause a bluescreen. So even if dolphin is doing something a bit weird, it's still a driver bug.
Make sure you have the latest driver version, if it still breaks please report to your GPU vendor.
I agree. While it is possible for a user app to do something that the driver doesn't know how to deal with, it is ultimately the driver's responsibility to never crash the system. I'm not sure if Windows 7 does this, but I know Windows 10's driver model makes it pretty damn hard for kernel drivers, especially GPU drivers, to bring down the system.
At worst, GPU drivers should simply cause the userspace app to crash if it doesn't know how to deal with input from userspace (an app crash would also make it much more clear where Dolphin is doing something wrong, as that's capture in a FIFO or a debugger). But a driver's #2 job imo (#1 being, provide an interface for HW) is to not crash the system when given invalid input or input it doesn't know how to handle.
All my drivers are completely up to date. I even have all the Windows Updates and latest version of DirectX, Visual C++ Redistributables, etc etc. Something Dolphin is doing specifically with Vulkan is causing massive problems. None of these problems exist on OpenGL.
(06-05-2018, 06:49 AM)DaRkL3AD3R Wrote: [ -> ]All my drivers are completely up to date. I even have all the Windows Updates and latest version of DirectX, Visual C++ Redistributables, etc etc. Something Dolphin is doing specifically with Vulkan is causing massive problems. None of these problems exist on OpenGL.
Please report this issue to nvidia. It is a bug with their driver.
I will once I hear from other Nvidia/Windows 7 users that this issue is replicated. I don't want to go reporting a driver bug if it's somehow specific to my setup. But after multiple formats and clean installs I am leaning towards 99% certainty there is some bad voodoo happening specifically with Dolphin and Nvidia drivers.