[Interest] Problems with graphics library auto-detect on Windows

[Neil Williams]

We have also gone down the forced ANGLE route after seeing too many crashes
caused by OpenGL, crashes on app start during the dynamic detection are
particularly frustrating. Intel cards seem to be the worst offender though
we were seeing them from all card types.

When our app crashes we upload crash dumps with GPU device and vendor id
embedded in it, the plan was to be able to build a custom opengl blacklist
based off these reports. The problem we had though is that were getting
different types of crashes from lots of different device combinations and
we had no way of checking out the crashes ourselves due to not having the
hardware.

In the end we went back to selectively forcing ANGLE/software renderer
based on a blacklist we maintain ourselves, which is basically the
blacklist in openglblacklist.json along with forced software rendering for
some VMs. We see a lot less graphics layer crashes with this setup.

We only support Vista upwards on windows mind.

You might also be interested in bug
https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-52693 which caused OpenGL detection
sourced crashes even when ANGLE is forced.

On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 3:41 PM, Michael R Nelson <mnelson at sutron.com>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
>
>
> Our app is QML based and uses Qt Quick Controls. We build for Windows, OS
> X, iOS, and Android.
>
>
>
> As you know, Qt auto-selects a graphics library at startup (OpenGL, ANGLE,
> or Mesa llvmpipe). About 1 in 15 of our users report our app fails during
> this auto-detect process on Windows. Most failures appear to be poor OpenGL
> support in the card/drivers, but sometimes the issue is “vsprintf_s” export
> not found error, when running on XP. Updating drivers is rarely a fix for
> these scenarios.
>
>
>
> We are coming to the conclusion we should force the use of ANGLE on
> Windows 7 and above, and force SoftOpenGL on XP. Have others also come to
> this conclusion? Does anyone have any helpful tips to share on this issue?
>
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Mike
>
>
>
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