Question / Help AverMedia LGX Videos source crashes AMD driver

[Nixxen]

Hey!

I've been setting up a dedicated streaming PC to free up some CPU power on my gaming PC.

Specs:
Windows 10 (fresh install, all windows update installed)
GPU: AMD Radeon R9 280x (latest release driver - NOT beta driver)
CPU: I7 960 - Stock clock.
Memory: Can't remember the specs, but Corsair Vengeance - 24gb in total.
Capture Card: AverMedia Live Gamer Extreme (latest LGX beta driver from the AverMedia site, also tried the release driver)

The capture card is plugged into a USB 3.0 port.

I've been working on this for a few days, and everything SEEMS to be in order.
Every time I start streaming or recording I enter into my "intro scene" with nothing but a background and some text.
This can run for hours with no issue. If I switch to my "game scene" where the capture is set up it sometimes works for a while, but more often than not it will crash the GPU driver within 5-10 seconds.
In turn, OBS also crashes.
If I remove the LGX capture from the scene everything is fine and it can keep running for hours again (well, theoretically. I never tested for hours, because who'd want to watch a stream of nothing :P - I did keep it up for quite a while though).

Sometimes when starting IN the "game scene" where the capture is active, the stream will run for a while (but more often that not crash the driver).
As soon as I switch scene - even to a scene without the capture - the driver will crash.

If I open RECentral 2 (the software Avermedia delivered for the capture card), the GPU driver crashes a few(3-5ish?) times until Windows automatically blocks the program from accessing the driver anymore. Force shutdown of the program is the only way to get out of it.

I'm a bit stumped as to what is causing the issue.
I've also attached the DXDiag report for those with the aptitude to read those.

Has anyone had a similar issue, and if so, what was the solution?
Any help you can give is appreciated.

 

[sam686]

Obs log says: Your video card or driver froze and was reset.

If there are no Blue screen of death and no lockups, just a GPU driver resets, this may be a graphics driver problem, or a graphics card problem. Maybe try a different graphics card, or plugging in the graphics card to the other x16 slot?

A stream-only computer don't need a strong graphics card, any compatible graphics card will do.

 

[Nixxen]

Thanks for the reply sam686!

There are no blue screens or proper fatal crashes.
There's a popup from OBS that mentions that "Texture->Map failed" followed by some numbers.
There's no crash dump in the OBS folder labeled "crashDumps".

I tried moving the GPU to another x16 slot.

It worked for preview when I started in the "game scene", so I got hopefull and tested a recording (instead of the stream going live/offline all the time). It crashed instantly. I checked the file that was created. It loaded the 1st second of sound (from test music playing on the stream PC) but none of the footage or sound from the capture card.

After some more troubleshooting I've found this as well:
If I disable the capture card video device before starting the recording I can switch around in the scenes as I please.
I can enable the capture card video device and not have any issues. I can STILL switch scenes without any problem.
It seems that is ONLY crashes when I have the capture card video device enabled the first time a scene with the capture card is loaded.

As for the GPU I have right now, I chose this one because it is a lot more silent than any of my alternatives (they sound like a vacuum cleaner from time to time, even with no load) so it was the most logical one to go with.
I suppose I could try to switch out the card for one of the vacuums for testing purposes, but I wouldn't be able to stream with that amount of background noise :P

 

[Nixxen]

I switched out the GPU to a HD5850 and reinstalled a driver that was compatible with this card (too old to work on the current R9 driver).

It works.
I'm not sure if it's the card or the driver, since the other older cards I have use the same driver as the HD5850.

As my mentor taught me; "Never fix a working thing" - So I'll stick to the HD5850 and find some monitor adapters that fit onto it.

Thanks for the suggestion :)

 

[sam686]

A program called "SpeedFan" may be able to show temperatures and adjust fan speed of AMD graphics card. Useful to quiet down loud, idling graphics card.

 

[Nixxen]

The HD5850 is quite silent (relatively speaking) so it doesn't really need any lower fan speed.

The "vacuum" cards was a couple of 6990 cards. They would run silent for a while, then suddenly kick into high gear and run all fans at 100% - even when the PC was doing nothing.

I will be checking out SpeedFan though, since any kind of noise reduction is better than no noise reduction :)