Bug in OS X OpenGL texture handling, that can crash OS X ?

Question

Hi,
i think, i found a serious bug in Leopard (10.5.2 and 10.5.3). But i can't find any infos on that. Does this sound familiar to anyone?
When i try to create large textures in OpenGL, i get a texture with noise in it. A closer look shows, that this noise are pieces of other application windows and/or the desktop. This texture also changes when i change other windows.
I wrote a small GLUT app that shows this problem: http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~juhees/opengl/main.cpp
It should look like this (just yellow: http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~juhees/opengl/2048.png ) but it looks more like this: http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~juhees/opengl/4096-1.png or this: http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~juhees/opengl/4096-2.png
As you can see, the lowe part of the noise is changeing. I get no OpenGL error in this app! So i can't check in my prog if the texture is too large for Mac OS X.
More importantly: I need offscreen render passes and if you try to render to that texture, OS X will instantly crash or give you strange graphic noise in fullscreen (and then crash). With offscreen passes that can happen even with 2048*2048 textures. A crash is more likely when using a depth buffer in the offscreen pass.
I tested this on an (Intel) iMac and on an (Intel) Mac Pro.
greetings
Robert

Answer 1

I don't know if this will help your particular situation or not, but here's my tale of misery condensed down to a few (?) pithy phrases. My Mac Pro 3 GHz. Xeon Quad was behaving so badly that I was almost ready to consign the whole set-up to the trash heap. I was having 40-50 hard crashes a day & couldn't get anything done. On the rare occasion when I successfully burned a DVD on the sixth or seventh attempt, it was effed-up. I couldn't even launch iDVD. I did a few Google searches and found all kinds of allegations of incompatibility between Open GL and 10.5.3, of ATI Radeon X1900XT (which I have) and NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT video cards being no good, etc. Finally I ran across a reference to smcFanControl and Temperature Monitor, both of which are free. What did I have to lose? My system was useless in its current state. I had already done a clean install, and run every "fix" known to man with NO positive results. The system crashed on startup after a clean install, and still wouldn't stay up and running for more than 10 minutes.
I installed these two apps, cranked up the fan speeds, and watched my heat sink temperatures plummet 60 degrees F. All of the artifacts and pixel lines on my 23 and 30-inch ACD's disappeared and are apparently gone for good. The system hasn't had a hiccup or a glitch in performance in the past 3 days doing video and photo rendering at full-speed. I used Spaces to set up all of the windows and graphs for Temperature Monitor on the Cinema Displays in Space 1, and run my other apps in other Spaces. If you like techie stuff, it's great fun and very impressive to look at... and it WORKS!!! At the very least, it'll keep you from going nuts and smashing all your Mac gear with a sledge hammer.
Bottom line: the video card was overheating, and the system was shutting itself down or going to sleep to prevent over-temperature damage. I learned yesterday that this feature is built-in so that you can't damage your 'puter by cooking it to death.
Leopard isn't smart enough to crank up the fan speeds to prevent trouble. *Temperature Monitor and smcFanControl cured ALL of my Mac's woes*. I'm very happy. ;=]
Everything is working like a dream... but I haven't worked up the nerve to re-up to 10.5.3 again. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. :-p