webgl_panorama_equirectangular.html consistently black

[RobertMars]

webgl_panorama_equirectangular.html consistently fails with a black screen whether local or remote. webgl_materials_cars_camaro.html fails locally. Other demos I've tried (~40) work both remotely and locally, including: canvas_geometry_panorama.html, webgl_materials_cars.html.

I downloaded/unzipped mrdoob-three.js-bd2f75b.zip, am using the latest Chrome, and run it via 'C:\Users\ME\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe --allow-file-access-from-files'. I also runas administrator, but no diff.

I'm on a i7 ThinkPad W520 and am able to display images 20,000 x 10,000 (from NASA), so not a memory shortage.

[alteredq]

Do you run Lenovo supplied drivers?

I have the same machine and everything works fine with latest stable Nvidia Verde drivers (285.62 WHQL), downloaded directly from Nvidia site:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/notebook-win7-winvista-64bit-285.62-whql-driver.html

I do however have turned off Optimus in BIOS, it was pretty unusable with WebGL, silly Intel GPU kept turning on for browsers.

[mrdoob]

I'm on a i7 ThinkPad W520 and am able to display images 20,000 x 10,000 (from NASA), so not a memory shortage.

But that's using the CPU or the GPU? May it be that the GPU can't handle big textures?

[alteredq]

GPU is fine. That's my machine, besides Mac Mini probably the most tested configuration for three.js out there ;)

Max texture size is 8,192 x 8,192 on ANGLE and 16,384 x 16,384 on OpenGL with Nvidia Quadro 2000M GPU.

Problem is that there is also second GPU, integrated Intel 3000 HD one which has quite crappy drivers (the same stuff latest Macbook Airs have and which causes tons of troubles for WebGL there) and Nvidia Optimus keeps switching it on for browsers.

Optimus is "automagic" thing by Nvidia that in theory is supposed to save your battery life by using integrated GPU for applications that it thinks don't need high-powered discrete GPU, but in practice it doesn't work all that well.

I tried to override this (so that Chrome and Firefox would always use Nvidia) to no success, so I just turned it off completely in BIOS.

[RobertMars]

It works! Installing the latest Nvidia driver and switching to the Discrete graphics driver instead of Nvidia Optimus as suggested fixed the problem. Thank you! It's a good thing Nvidia updated the Discrete driver as the original version I had, less than a year old, only supported a maximum resolution of 1280x800 whereas the latest supports 1600x900 as desired.

[mrdoob]

Yay!