Fusion 9 is quite "crashy"

In four months of heavy use I've only had one crash with Resolve but when I'm doing stuff like camera tracking, Fusion crashes quite frequently -- usually just disappearing from the screen and requiring a restart.

I'm used to saving my work regularly so I don't usually lose more than a minute or two of work but I am surprised at the difference in reliability between Resolve and Fusion -- given they come from the same company (now anyway).

My system is well spec'd for Fusion (6-cores, 4.4GHz, 16GB RAM and a GTX1060/6 GPU) and I have no other reliability issues so I guess it's just Fusion itself.

9 times out of 10 it has to do with your Open CL settings in Fusion. Even with a quick GPU using it, it doesn't make a huge time difference in day to day operations, but it does seem to affect stability of - amongst other things - the tracker. Turning Open CL off has greatly reduced the number of crashes on my system.

You mentioned running Resolve... at least using Windows 10 and Nvidia graphics you can't run Resolve and Fusion at the same time. Resolve will cause Fusion to crash. In addition to the changes Sander mentioned, try running Fusion without running Resolve.

Also, I have heard reports that Fusion gets more unstable if your processor is overclocked.

Personally, as of 9.0.2, I find Fusion 9 to be about as stable as 7 was. I still see occasional crash conditions, but they're not common for me. Maybe twice a day at most if I'm not scripting—Houdini crashes on me more frequently than that. There's another artist in our facility with hardware identical to mine, though, that gets frequent crashes using the BSpline tool, which I never see. He does use a lot of anchors on his splines, though, so maybe that has something to do with it. In any case, there's not something inherent in Fusion 9 that makes it unstable; I suspect that it's just not well-tested on enough different hardware configurations.

Good point. There might be specific patterns that only Fusion creates often enough to expose a hardware problem. Like Fusion does memory allocation and read/writes in a way that other applications don't. If you have a hardware issue with your memory controller or RAM, you might issues with Fusion, but rarely with anything else.

Unfortunately, this is really hard to test. Production comps don't help, you need specific repo cases and if it's specific to your machine and unpredictable (because it's affected by heat or whatever), then even moreso.

Reminds me of an old bug in Fusion's skin where the "green channel" button graphic in the viewer was black, not green. I reported this and out of dozens of people who checked, including three developers, all saw a green button. Turns out the skin had bitmaps for red, green, blue, and RGB, and all but the green had alpha of 1.0, while the green bitmap had alpha of 0.0. If I changed the alpha in the bitmap, everything was fine. but... I was the only one who could see this bug. No one else ever saw it. The bitmap was clearly wrong, and the premultiplication was causing an expected result, but only on my system.

This system is uber-stable with other applications and the crashes generally *only* happen when doing camera-tracking. Even then, it's not during the track or solve operations, it's almost always when moving stuff around in the perspective view -- at which time neither the CPU or GPU are under much load at all.

Also, I don't run Resolve and Fusion at the same time so that's unlikely to be a factor.

Given that 90% of my use for Fusion is in camera tracking, perhaps it's just that I use this feature more than most folk and therefore, if there are a few uncaught bugs, I'm far more likely to find them.

That's very likely. I have access to PFTrack, so I very rarely use CameraTracker. Have you contacted support directly about it? The forum is mostly user-to-user assistance, and I don't think there are ever any tickets created based on problems reported here.

For me the camera tracker is unusable. I'm trying to use it for the first time and with all the defaults or many different iterations of adjustments the program crashes after 8-10 frames of collecting tracking data. The program crashes every time. I've tried it at least 15 times.

Also attempted the step by step guide in the 3D Camera Tracking Chapter (12) of the Resolve 15 Fusion Visual Effects guide and the program crashes when trying to run the tracker.

Changing from Open CL to Cuda doesn't make any difference. Camera tracking crashes regardless of my GPU settings and my memory settings (tried maxing out both Fusion and Resolve memory allocation).

Too bad because camera tracking is the main thing I would use the Fusion page for. I will have to use another program to do any compositing which goes against the main reason I bought Resolve Studio -- to have one program for my entire workflow.

Davinci Resolve 15.3.1.003
Windows 10 Version 1809 OS Build 17763.379 (Pro)
AMD Ryzen 7 1700x 8-Core, 3775 Mhz Processor
Asus Prime X370-PRO Motherboard (BIOS v3803)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070
32GB RAM

If you want to use the camera tracker more, I'd suggest installing the new public Beta of 16. The camera tracker has been greatly improved in stability in this release.