Our Structural Engineering group has a HP Workstation ZX6000 ANSYS simulation machine which is crashing constantly during a simulation while the user is working on it. If we leave the simulation alone it goes thru fine. We believe it to be the video driver. The machine has an ATI FireGL X1 card. We loaded the most current driver but that doesn't help. Just wondering if anyone else is having a similar issue. Any advice/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
Seng
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I'm afraid there is no path to a newer driver for Windows XP. Microsoft has dropped support for the Workstation version of Windows XP for the Itanium platform. I believe that Nvidia had an IPF WinXP-64 driver for their 980 XGL graphics card. If you can find this driver and a card, it may be more stable. Alternatively, you could uninstall the ATI driver and use the standard Microsoft VGA driver. This driver would not support hardware accelerated 3D rendering, but should provide a stable desktop.
Appreciate very much your input and advice. It helped out a lot. We're planning on upgrading our OS to Linux. Do you think our ATI card would perform more stable under this platform?
It's hard to say if the card will be more stable with Linux. ATI has not been updating the IPF closed source driver for this card, and I don't know if the current open source driver provides accelerated 3D rendering for the X1.
I recall that the most recent IPF Linux drivers were relatively solid, and you can render to remote workstations with GLX protocol from Linux, so my guess is that you'd have better luck or at least more flexibility with Linux.
The zx6000 is an obsolete product, if you're just trying to extend it's life, it's worth some experiments. If you require a fully supported (Hardware and software) system for mission critical use, I think you'd be better off with a new Workstation.
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