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This is a note, partially for reference but also for interest on configurations of UHD displays, multiple graphics cards and problems running MiniTioune.
I upgraded my laptop to a UHD display (3840x2140) and set about reinstalling all of my applications.
The laptop(an i7) uses an Intel HD Graphics 630 interface controlling the LCD display and an NVIDIA Quatro P4000 for any external display. The NVIDIA card had 8GB of dedicated memory.
When I first installed MiniTioune, all the drivers, graphs etc installed correctly and I could easily verify that they had installed. Using the TestMyMiniTiouner_v2.0a.exe tool, the MiniTiouner was successfully detected and the USB I2C performance was up in the top 80/low 90 % area.
However, when I came to run CheckMiniTiouneDriverAndFilters_V0_5a.exe, I got the error as shown
- d3d9 error.png (30.78 Kio) Vu 30860 fois
However MiniTioune_V0_8s.exe ran after double clicking on it albeit, after receiving this as an error
- videogrf.png (8.58 Kio) Vu 30860 fois
After much back and forth with Jean-Pierre, we couldn't get anything to work, despite Jean-Pierre also using UHD displays for his setup and on his laptop.
Eventually, I dropped the resolution on my display to FHD (1920x1080) and tried again and this time both the CheckMiniTiouneDriverAndFilters_V0_5a.exe and MiniTioune_V0_8s.exe ran without errors.
I restored the resolution back to UHD, and again, the two programs continued to work successfully.
Until last week.
I had the two errors shown above appear again and no amount of changing the resolution would work this time. D3D9.dll kept faulting when the check program was run, and MiniTioune would not show any decoded video. All the usual Windows checking (sfc \scannow etc) did not reveal any issues with the integrity of my Windows installation.
Again, with huge help from Jean-Pierre, the whole installation was double checked and the only conclusion that could be found was that there must be some corruption in the D3D9.dll file.
In Windows 10, this is part of the base operating system and not an installable update. Also, with different releases of Windows 10 (e.g. 1803, 1809 etc), the version of D3D9.dll appears to be different size and its details/versions differ. However, finding a copy of it on another computer in the house with the same version of Windows 10, I compared that copy to the one on my laptop and they where identical. For sanity reasons, I did install MiniTioune on the other computer and it worked.
Conclusion - there is another factor that impacts on the ability of MiniTioune to work correctly, but both Jean-Pierre and I did not have any clue what it was.
Looking back over the configuration of my laptop, I remembered that one setting I had altered when testing some other programs, was the preferred GPU. I had changed the settings so that my laptop preferred the NVIDIA GPU over the Intel one and, whilst everything else was working, I decided to revert this back to the default setting of letting the system decide.
And suddenly, CheckMiniTiouneDriverAndFilters_V0_5a.exe and MiniTioune_V0_8s.exe both ran without problems. Why this is, is not clear but I thought it useful for others facing simiar issues.
Jean-Pierre has stated in an email to me that "I do nothing else than ask Windows to display the video inside a renderer, and I suppose(?) that Windows try to display the video on the LCD using the Intel GPU and Minitioune renderer is on the other display using nVidia GPU".
My laptop is a Dell Precision 7720. Jean-Pierre thinks it is specific to a laptop that continues to use a lcd driven by the Intel GPU and an external display driven by a nVidia GPU - has anyone else experienced such problems with laptops/multiple graphics cards/altered GPU configurations to understand what is causing this problem?
Thanks Jean-Pierre for the great support.
73s
Ciaran
M0XTD