NVIDIA Studio Driver 431.70 WHQL

I have never ever gained or lost 5 FPS in game or bench simply from rebooting or the time of day unless I have changed a setting or something was extremely wrong. 1% repeatability or better is standard. I'd find out what is wrong with your system(s) since you apparently consistently have very inconsistent performance.

 

time of day being when windows chooses to do definition updates, and run background tasks.

no indepth testing ever reproduces the same framerate changes that end users spout on forums.

 

Yeah, the patch fixed the ntoskrnl.exe DPC latency issue in 1903, but for me (and some people i saw on /r/Windows10) it left a problem with ndis.sys DPC latency in place.

I tried everything I could think of (like resetting winsock and the tcp stack, disabling/uninstalling drivers, etc.), but in trying to fix the problem I instead made everything much worse and went from ~750µs with audio crackles/pops to frequent spikes of 7500-12000µs. This made the system unbelievably laggy while copying files at 1Gbit (higher speed = worse), and "Interrupts" in Process Explorer went from 6% to 66% completely randomly, making the system almost completely unusable. Switching NIC between IRQ/MSI or any other driver made no difference.
I also noticed some unusual stutters in Star Trek Online.

I eventually manually reset what I could using a functioning 1809 system as a template, but to no avail.
Peculiarly enough was that the latency spikes only occured when receiving data, I never noticed any issues sending data (used LAN to test).

Today I believe i finally found a possible solution: Antivirus/Firewall

I normally use ESET Internet Security and have done so with no issue until 1903.
Disabling it made no difference whatsoever, only uninstalling it completely helped. I promptly reinstalled a clean copy of the latest version, and the DPC went nuts again. Uninstall and everything was fine (I've seen two ~1000µs spikes since then, but only briefly and noticed no issues at those moments).

I also had a friend complaining about bad performance using Avira a while ago, which was also solved in the same way. I can't say with any certainty that the two issues are related though.

Curiously enough Windows Defender built into Windows 10 works perfectly fine without any latency spikes. I have no idea how or why.

Hope this helps anyone experiencing similar issues.

 

^This happens because MS want to GTFO every AV solution from Win 10.But this will make another path to corporate monopolistic move and obvious EU will not agree this.

 

Why? They do not sell their own antivirus.

 

this worries me, i also use ESET, lol... have you tried disabling NDU? There are several sites that specify how to disable, if you google 'disable ndu windows 10' you should find it. Make sure you don't disable 'Null' driver also (in same area of registry, lots of guides say to do it), or random stuff will break. I had to re-enable the Null driver because Dropbox stopped working, lol.

But NDU is the "Network Data Usage monitoring driver," basically only useful for monitoring when you are on a metered connection. After disabling on both my home and work pc's, i can say Windows 10 feels way smoother again.

Edit: i just ran latencymon and holy crap ntoskernel is hitting 7762µs ... time to check if i have the hotfix (i thought i was on an insider build, right now winver shows 1903, build 18898)

 

"Adds support for 30-bit color on GeForce and TITAN GPUs"

Wasn't this added months ago? Is it only in Studio drivers or all drivers (does 435 branch have this?)

 

It was first added in this (431.70) Studio driver released only a month ago, and is also available in 436.02 Game Ready and subsequent drivers.

 

No, this is the first I've heard of NDU. I'm not on a metered connection either, and I tried both Ethernet & Wifi (Ethernet is integrated, Wifi is a separate PCI-E card) to exclude the NIC itself.

I did notice that ESET injected a "driver" into every single device I looked at though (more than just network devices. edevmon i think the file was called), I don't know if that has anything to do with it.
Odd that problems would only show up now after using EIS for 2 years straight over several versions of Windows though.

I'm on 18362.295 with the hotfix installed if that helps in any way.

Certainly interesting stuff, but I'll probably leave it alone for now as I've been tearing my hair out over this for a while now.
Thanks for the information though, it might come in handy in the future if I decide to try again.

 

Microsoft made some changes in late 1809, and followed into 1903, where some component was updated, and caused havoc on several AV packages, where system latency would be brutal. The AV companies need to update their engines to the new component spec.

MS Defender runs well because their product was updated for the release of the new component. Some AVs still need to update (looking at you McAfee).

 

Really odd that even such a well respected company as ESET isn't keeping up-to-date, especially since they tend to score well in performance tests.

Thanks for the insight, it certainly gives some well needed perspective on the issue.

 

I agree, I would be surprised if ESET has this issue. When I was reading about this I could have sworn that ESET was listed as being updated.

 

You wouldn't happen to remember where you read about this? I'd like to know more if possible.

I also want to report that I've had a singular audio pop whilst playing STO since switching to Windows Defender, so even if it's better than ESET was, it's not quite perfect still.
Even before I screwed it up even worse somehow that is. How could resetting winsock and the tcp stack make it so much worse anyway? I didn't even manage to mitigate it in any way afterwards.

The spikes I've seen since still point to ndis.sys btw; I don't know what MS has done this time around. I wish they did more/better QA.

Chances are I'm gonna have to clean install Windows again once 1909 comes out and hope that resolves everything. Not looking forward to doing that, as I have a lot of things that need to be put back in place after an install.

Edit: Second audio crackle. Still an improvement, but I'm no closer to understanding what to do about it (can I even do anything about it?)
Disabling Base Filtering service (suggested by someone in a post i made in Operating systems) is greyed out in services so i can't stop it (I'm admin). Guess I need to work around that if i want to try it.

 

2 things regarding AV:

1) sometimes putting in an exclusion for the game folder of a game having issues can sometimes help. This is partly because the game is accessing files in another location and the AV is going crazy analyzing what the game is trying to do (like access dxgi.dll or something similar)

2) i switched to Fast Ring and got insider builds 18695 and 18970 this week, and both of them made ESET show blank when i try to pull up Advanced Options, lol... the settings are all still there; I ran ecmd (ESET's Command Line utility) and exported my settings to xml, and everything still seemed to be there. Just a heads up if you ever decide to try insider builds, ESET may do weird things (I forgot or I would have stopped myself before upgrading, lol). On the bright side i think my latency is better, been running LatencyMon and highest is ~850µs.

1 other thing about latency:

CFG - Control Flow Guard is a thing in Windows 10 that prevents exploits but can impact regular programs also. I always disable it systemwide, but you can disable per app also to be safer. If you go into Windows Settings ( Win+i ) and search for CFG, it will give the option for Exploit Protection (can also get to it through Security Center but its like 10 more clicks). Microsoft was made aware in May 2019 and said a fix was coming, but i dont think any hotfix specifically mentions this. It was found by the Vivaldi team (chrome based browser), when it made a 100 minute test suite take 300-360 minutes, lol.

 

Yes, I always exclude folders that I deem safe (like games) for the small gain it sometimes gives.

I ran latencymon all day yesterday after i heard the audio crackle, but no DPC latency spikes or pops/crackles (except an ISR spike when accidentally saving 2 screenshots in a row with ShareX, d'oh.). Typical:

Thank you very much for the information, I appreciate it. Troubleshooting can be a real pain sometimes.

Edit: Sorry I meant interrupt to process latency, not ISR. I took a screen of it: https://i.imgur.com/kRq2Wdh.jpg

 

They didn't sell IE either.

 

No,they push out from Win 10 every foreign AV solution.