LW Freezes in G4 dual machines

[renrique]

Using PowerMacs G4 Dual 1 Ghz and 1.25 Ghz LW freezes when rotating in the perspective viewport or when I try to make operations like Booleans.

Any idea of how to fix it?

[Triple G]

Do a search through this forum and you'll find that you are anything but alone in your frustration. It is a bug which ATI, Apple, and Newtek have been made aware of, and has been going on since April of this year. Supposedly they are working on a solution, but that's not much consolation when you need to get work done.

There's a few things you could try:

1) Install an Nvidia-based card in your machine instead of the Radeon,
2) Downgrade your OS back to 10.2.4, which is the last version known to reliably work with Lightwave Modeler and Radeon cards, or
3) Try installing the newly available 10.2.8, which may or may not have fixed the problem.

*edit* I just assumed you had a Radeon card installed in the systems you mentioned, though you didn't specifically state it. Your symptoms sound very similar to the above-mentioned Radeon/Modeler/10.2.6 bug....if this is not the case and you do NOT have an ATI card installed, well...I'm not sure what to tell you.

[ateale]

i am also having this problem, and it really really sucks. Lightwave is pretty much unusable for me now.
I have a dual 1.42 gHz G4, running 10.2.6, with an ATI card I'm guessing.

So i guess all we can do is wait for Newtek and Apple to get back to us??

[renrique]

Yes, maybe we will have to wait for a mac os x upgrade. I doensn´t download yet the 10.2.8 in this machines, I hope it will fix it, or pray for the LW 8 had fixed too

[toby]

the problem comes up in other programs as well, like maya, so I doubt there's anything Newtek can (or should ) do technically - they have however asked ATI to fix the problem, which carries more weight with ATI than us users.

[ateale]

someone suggested deleting the LW preferences. it seemed to be working fine for about 20 minutes but ended up freezing.

The opinions I've read about 10.2.8 don't seem to be very positive, apparently it breaks a lot of things. I think they took it off software update. I'm gonna wait until 10.3 I think.

[Mark Borok]

I'm using 6.5 and I've gotten a couple of crashes, once when dollying in the perspective view and once when panning in one of the ortho views. The cursor still moves, occasionally turning into a "spinning beachball", clicking the mouse won't do anything and the only way out is to restart the computer. Is this the same thing you guys are talking about? It's only happened a couple of times in the last few days.

[renrique]

Yes, is the same problem I get, the curious thing is that in the 1 Ghz dual machines the problem persist but in the 1.25 Ghz dual the problem has dissapeared. Only sometimes for a few seconds the machine suspends the actions and suddenly continues working

[Triple G]

Originally posted by renrique
Yes, is the same problem I get, the curious thing is that in the 1 Ghz dual machines the problem persist but in the 1.25 Ghz dual the problem has dissapeared. Only sometimes for a few seconds the machine suspends the actions and suddenly continues working

Do you have the same model graphics card in both machines? According to ATI, the problem only affects the Radeon 8500 and 9000 series cards.

[Nick Keeble]

I'm getting the same problem - it seems to happen every time I use the drag tool, after I've been using it for a few minutes. It's happened to me before but only once in a while - now it happens all the time and it's driving me mad! It's strange that it's only just started happening now because I upgraded to 10.2.6 several weeks ago and I didn't notice anything wrong at first - does everyone think it's a mistake to upgrade to 10.2.8? The next time I get it working I'm never upgrading again!

[renrique]

I´m ´gíving a training couse today on 12 G4 Dual machines, I will suggest the people to upgrade the Mac OS X to 1.2.8 to see the results.

I will let you know how it works.

[Triple G]

No, no, no, no...DON'T UPGRADE TO 10.2.8!!!! Apple took it down for a REASON!

It does nothing to address the ATI/Modeler bug, and the OS itself introduces more problems than it fixes. See this page (http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/archives/sep03/092303.html#S16201) on xlr8yourmac for details.

Until ATI gets this issue resolved, your best course of action is to reinstall Jaguar from your CD, select the Archive and Install option, then patch it back up to 10.2.4, (you can get it here (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=70168&sessionID=anonymous%7C13246851&kbhost=kbase.info.apple.com%3a80%2f)), which is the last OS proven to reliably work with LW and ATI cards.

Either that, or install 10.2.4 on a separate hard drive and boot into that whenever you need to work with LW. Or, if you've got the money, buy an Nvidia card. :rolleyes:

[renrique]

Thank you 4 the advice!