this was a situation i’ve found that was brought up on a thread in the GameDeveloper site…
when my program i’m working on crashes, the stuff i had on the card, like textures/display lists, etc. are not being freed, so after like 2 or 3 crashes, the card’s memory’s filled so it drops back to software mode <uggh>.
well, to correct the problem, i just would run qIII (which is exactly what the poster of this same topic on the other site said he did) and all was well.
how did carmack and his crew of pixelmasters clear the memory for me? i’d love to do this myself. it’d make me feel cool and stuff (besides, i end up playing qIII too much when this happens…)
i’m interested in this too… however, i think the problem is not directly due to the memory filling: probably it’s due to o.s. resource managing, or maybe the driver itself.
i found different behaviours between nvidia and matrox cards: matrox seem not to suffer from this problem.
also, with nvidia drivers, when an application crash and fails to release the rc, the next time i run any gl application, the client area is always on top of other windows: i thought it was a bug with my framework, so i tested with glut and ms aux… same behaviour.
have you experienced the same problem?
DMY
[This message has been edited by dmy (edited 12-27-2000).]
Try to switch the screen resolution back and forth (what you probably did starting Quake).
That should reconfigure the graphics to some well defined state.
Well, thanks for talking about me behind my
back but I have no idea, as Windows
kernel hacking is new to me.
From previous discussion, I guess that the
problem is that the nVidia OpenGL DLL does
not get “detach” messages from the now
dead and defunct processes. One thing I
can think of to force that is to find the
DLL and manually unload it, although just
mentioning that scares me so that’s probably
not right
i tried yet in the past to change resolution back and forth, and it didn’t worked…
interesting suggestion about detaching… i’ll try to develope a procedure for it.
looks like we’re gonna have to wait till bgl or the nvidia guys come back from holiday 
but I have no idea, as Windows