Video and OpenGL Problems

Photon Engineering adheres strictly to the OpenGL standard for its 3D viewer implementation, but sometimes, graphics card drivers may cause problems or crashes. Indeed, more often than not, a crash recorded against FRED.EXE in the windows event log will reference a dll that is related to graphics.

The following solutions are recommended:

1. Select Tools > Preferences from the menu and click on the Visualization tab. Set the pixel format to “Safe” to enforce a software rendering mode. Please note that any changes to FRED preferences do not take effect until a new FRED is opened.  In practice, this is not a long-term solution since the software rendering mode used with the "Safe" option has poor performance.  But, testing this setting will confirm that the graphics card driver being used is the root cause of the crashing/unresponsive 3D viewer behavior.
2. Use the GLView.exe utility included with your FRED installation to determine an acceptable OpenGL hardware rendering mode for your graphics card.  Please see the built-in FRED Help topic, Troubleshooting, Errors and Warnings > 3D View Problems for a detailed description of how to use this utility.  In general, choose a pixel mode in which the “letter cube” of the GLView.exe utility rotates without flickering. (This may not necessarily be the fastest rotation.)
3. Download and install the latest video drivers from your manufacturer’s website. It is strongly recommended to perform a clean installation of new graphics drivers where possible (note that NVidia driver software offers a "clean installation" checkbox as part of their custom install options).