storytold/photocraft

An update, @hambydustin-eng: #252 (on main) makes startup survive driver crashes like yours. Before creating the GPU device, PhotoCraft now writes a small "starting" marker. If the previous launch died inside the driver, the next launch automatically steps to a safer backend: on Windows Vulkan → DX12 → the CPU renderer. It remembers the choice that worked (Preferences › Performance shows it, with a Reset button). Intel adapters on Windows now default to DX12, since the Intel Vulkan driver was the crasher here. `WGPU_BACKEND` still overrides everything, `--safe-gpu` forces the CPU renderer for one launch, and Help › System Info shows the adapter, backend and driver in use.

If the driver crashes before the backend is chosen, that one launch can still crash, but the next one should start on DX12. When the next release is out, could you try it without any `WGPU_BACKEND` override (including opening a `.pcraft` by double-click) and tell us what System Info reports? That will let us close th...

Status after 0.2.0 + #83: DNG (incl. phone DNGs), Canon CR2, Sony ARW (lossless **and** the default compressed cRAW), Panasonic RW2 (RawFormat 5) and uncompressed Olympus ORF decode in the clean-room `photocraft-raw` crate.

Still open, and why:
- **Nikon compressed NEF** (Nikon's default): its decompression tables are only documented in GPL code (dcraw/LibRaw) or write-ups derived from it, so a clean-room implementation isn't possible without an independent specification. These files open their full-size embedded JPEG preview, with a warning.
- **CR3, RAF (X-Trans), compressed ORF/PEF, RW2 RawFormat 4:** same situation or not yet investigated; they also open the embedded preview.
- **Calibrated colour for non-DNG cameras:** needs per-camera matrices we can't take from third-party tables.

Converting to DNG (Adobe DNG Converter) gives full-quality decoding for any camera today.

Progress: #65 landed the first cut of the clean-room `photocraft-raw` decoder: DNG (uncompressed and lossless JPEG, tiles, colour matrices, GainMap; phone DNGs included), Canon CR2, Sony lossless ARW, and uncompressed NEF/ARW/PEF, with bilinear, MHC and AHD demosaicing, opened as 16-bit ProPhoto documents.

Still open here:
- vendor-compressed NEF/ARW/PEF (Nikon's default lossless-compressed NEF in particular), CR3, RAF and ORF/RW2 currently open their embedded preview with a warning;
- calibrated colour for non-DNG cameras (they're currently treated as sRGB primaries, so slightly undersaturated);
- highlight reconstruction and a default tone curve.

Update, @hambydustin-eng: on top of the `Rgba16Float` fallback from #22, #37 (now on `main`) hardens GPU start-up further:

- if the GPU compositor's pipelines can't be built on an adapter (an unsupported render-target format, a shader-compiler failure such as the D3D12/FXC one we just fixed), PhotoCraft now **falls back to the CPU compositor instead of crashing**;
- on adapters that can't render 32-bit float targets, documents without layer effects stay on the GPU and only effect rendering moves to the CPU.

One honest caveat: your crash was an access violation inside `igvk64.dll` itself. If the Intel driver segfaults (rather than reporting an error to wgpu), no fallback in our code can catch it. So this may well be fixed, but I can't confirm it without your hardware. Could you try the next build (0.2.0) **without** `WGPU_BACKEND=dx12`? If it still crashes, please reopen or comment with the log, and we'll look at defaulting Intel adapters on Windows to DX12.

Thanks again for the thor...

Thanks for the thorough investigation and the DX12 workaround, @hambydustin-eng — that was really useful. 🙏

I believe your crash shares a root cause with #7: the GPU compositor rendered into an `Rgba32Float` target, which the Intel Vulkan driver (igvk64.dll) doesn't support as a render target — hence the `0xc0000005` at pipeline creation on the Vulkan backend, while DX12 happened to tolerate it. #22 makes the compositor **detect this per adapter** and fall back to `Rgba16Float` when `Rgba32Float` isn't renderable, so the default launch (including the `.pcraft` file association, which doesn't get your `WGPU_BACKEND=dx12` override) should now start on Vulkan too.

Could you try the next Windows build **without** the `WGPU_BACKEND` override and let me know if it launches and opens a document? If it still crashes in igvk64.dll, please reopen with the new log — there may be a second Vulkan-specific issue beyond the render-target format, and I'll dig further. (Diagnostics that help most: wh...