Has anyone seen this type of crash before (Mac, Retina, Graphics3D render)?

Questions
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1

Hello,
I am seeing unpredictable (to me at least) crashes when rendering or rotating 3d graphics objects. I cannot reproduce the crash consistently, but it correlates with rendering 3d graphics. I’ve been seeing this for some time, but I’m giving a graphics intensive presentation next week and fear having a crash in the middle of a presentation…

Macbook MacOs 10.9.5
Built-in Retina, Display and NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 2048 MB graphics card,
Mathematica 10.0.1.
16GB memory.

I don’t know if this is related to graphics crashes related to this community discussion: community post

The system log is producing this, which appears to directly related to the problem:

crash.png
crash.png3368×1274 359 KB

If the text is hard to read the critical message is:

Thu Oct/9/14 3:51:09.481 PM Mathematica[32476]: CGContextTranslateCTM: invalid context 0x0. This is a serious error. This application, or a library it uses, is using an invalid context and is thereby contributing to an overall degradation of system stability and reliability. This notice is a courtesy: please fix this problem. It will become a fatal error in an upcoming update.

I am searching through the front end options and am seeing several options for graphics, but some are undocumented: including Graphics3DRenderingEngine which is currently Automatic, but I’m wondering if changing this might help.

Does anyone have any suggestions as workaround for my presentation next monday…

2

My reflex is to suggest resetting initialization files to default contents.

The Mathematica preference and cache files can be reset by holding

down the SHIFT and OPTION keys as Mathematica starts. If that does

not correct it, the bigger hammer is to delete the folder

~/Library/Mathematica/FrontEnd/

under your home directory. It might be necessary to do this again

after restarting your computer.

(See also Wolfram Support Quick Answers: How do I fix common problems by resetting Mathematica 14.0 to its default configuration? .)

Have you tried different resolution settings?

3

Thanks Bruce,
I’ve done the hammer approach recently (within the last week). I’ll give the shift-option approach as well. But the problem is that, due to the unpredictability, I can’t be sure if problem would be resolved.

The crash log is a bit worrisome to me. It is akin to reading tea leaves but it seems as though the graphics engine is trying to access memory at 0x0.

Craig

4

Craig,

Please send to support@wolfram.com:

  • the MacOS crash report (not the same as the console messages),

  • a notebook that this crash happens with,

  • a notebook with the output from evaluating SystemInformation[], and

  • the output from the System Profiler / System Information application.
    Click on the Apple menu - About this Mac, click “More Info…”,

    – in System Profiler click File menu - Save As to save the
    information in a file and send me that (Text format preferred).

    – in newer Macs, in the System Information application click
    the System Report button and save the window of information
    (File menu - Save).

In the subject line or early in the body of the email, include “Community Discussion 366763”.

Thank you.