Dr. House

Lori and I are hooked on the TV show "House", where Hugh Laurie plays a really grumpy doctor who solves bizarre medical cases more or less by ESP. The characters are well written, but the medical plot line is somewhat predictable: there are four quarters to the show - in each one House except the last, House will make the wrong diagnosis and the patient will get worse right before the commercial break. (Usually this involves massive bleeding or cardiac arrest going into the long commecial block at 0:30.) None of the symptoms fit until the very end when House finds the simple right explanation they just couldn't see.

This set of nvidia crash bugs felt a lot like that - we had multiple attempted fixes, some of which didn't help at all, until finally after multiple tries I found a bug that explained all of the otherwise completely weird behavior we were seeing.

But I must admit - I have brought shame on the house of X-Plane...the buggy code was mine and the mistake was really stupid. Why nVidia on Windows? As far as I can tell the optimizers present in most OpenGL engines can change whether (and how) the bug manifests itself - different OS/driver pair: different engine with different optimizers.

Now that (at risk of massively jinxing ourselves) we have the crash bug fixed, I will resume performance work. Once we get a build done with all of the immediate performance items I want to cover, we'll start collecting user reports on in-field performance. So I should have more specific instructions on what you can do to help us isolate performance problems in the next few days.