[WHAT ARE THE CAUSES OF UNEXPLAINED BEHAVIOUR IN LUMION?]

WHAT ARE THE CAUSES OF UNEXPLAINED BEHAVIOUR IN LUMION?

Unfortunately, it's quite often difficult to troubleshoot unexplained behaviour like warped polygons or spontaneous reboots. Ideally, we would need 100% identical hardware and software configurations to be able to determine what's causing the problems you're experiencing.

It would obviously be useful if we could rule out any hardware issues first. Reboots for example are typically caused by a lack of power (e.g. using a GeForce GTX 580 with a 450 Watt power supply), overheating or in a small number of cases, a faulty graphics card.

To rule out hardware issues, please run OCCT:
http://www.ocbase.com/index.php/download
 
If your graphics card and power supply can operate without errors for a reasonable length of time, please read on.

Warped polygons can be caused by graphics card driver problems (which is often the case with Quadro and FirePro cards) or lack of onboard graphics card memory and/or lack of system memory.

Driver problems can also occur if you install a new driver without uninstalling older/existing drivers first. In some cases, Windows may continue to use parts of the older driver, and parts of the new driver and the result is unexplained behaviour, spontaneous reboots and/or driver crashes.

On PCs with a single graphics card, you should never have more than 1 graphics driver installed. Any more than that and you are asking for trouble.

By now, you might already have had a look at the Uninstall or change a program list in Windows and only found 1 installed graphics card driver, e.g. Nvidia or AMD drivers.

But annoyingly enough, Windows actually keeps previous drivers for the devices that you have plugged into your PC (past and present). The reason you don't know this is that they are hidden in the Device Manager.

In the following post, I'll explain how you can determine which graphics card drivers Windows has hidden from you in the Device Manager, and how to get rid of them.

[HOW DO I AVOID GRAPHICS CARD DRIVER CONFLICTS?]

HOW DO I AVOID GRAPHICS CARD DRIVER CONFLICTS?

To avoid graphics card driver conflicts, it is often necessary to completely remove existing drivers from your system and install the latest driver.

IMPORTANT
The following procedure only applies to PCs with a single graphics card.

You should only follow this procedure if you agree that:

Act-3D B.V. assume no responsibility or liability for any injury, loss or damage incurred as a result of any use or reliance upon the information and material contained within or downloaded from the Lumion3D forum.

In other words, don't blame us if your PC blows up after uninstalling old unused graphics drivers

HOW DO I REMOVE OLDER GRAPHICS CARD DRIVERS COMPLETELY AND INSTALL THE LATEST DRIVER IN WINDOWS 7?

1) Uninstall existing drivers: The first step is to click on the Windows "Start" button, and type in "Uninstall a program". Uninstall any NVIDIA or AMD/ATI graphics card drivers on the list of installed programs. Once the drivers have been uninstalled, restart Windows when prompted to do so by the installer. After rebooting, Windows may automatically install older generic drivers for your graphics card. The next step explains how to get remove this driver as well.

2) Remove older graphics card drivers: Follow the procedure described on the images below. I personally uninstall all installed Display Adapter drivers with the "Delete the driver software for this device" option.

3) Purge Registry: Download and install CCleaner, and run the Registry cleaner function to get rid of any unused registry entries left behind by the graphics card driver:
http://www.piriform.com/CCLEANER

4) Install latest drivers: Find out if you have an AMD/ATI card or an NVIDIA card. Then download and install the latest drivers:
AMD/ATI: http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Pages/auto_detect.aspx
NVIDIA: http://www.nvidia.co.uk/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-uk

Once the drivers have been installed, restart Windows when prompted to do so by the installer. Double-check that there is only 1 entry in Device Manager -> Display Adapters. And that's it, you're done: There is now only 1 graphics card driver installed on your system.
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Here are the images that describe step 2: