DPC Latency issues seems related to graphics drivers

I'm unsure this is the right category, but as I'm new in the forums I hope you can forgive me if it isn't.

I've had audiostutters for a very long time now, and due to not knowing why I've found myself searching the net for it every now and then. I stumbled upon a tool a few ways ago, namely the DPC Latency Checker. What you want with this is all green bars. I've mostly got red, though, spiking at about 11ms almost all the time!

I've gotten so far that I'm positive that the DPC latencyissues I'm experiencing is the cause of my audio drop-outs/stutters. However, as for why I'm getting them is a whole other thing. And after checking with Microsoft Windows Performance Toolkit(xperf), I can see that the culprit seems to be dxgkrnl.sys, which I've ironed out to being the Direct X Graphic Kernel. The DPC latency view shows that dgxkrnl.sys has peaks of 12ms latency, as opposed to the next entry in the list which max is at 0.09ms.

So, the culprit seems to be dxgkrnl.sys, the Direct X Graphic Kernel. That led me to try to disable the Graphics Card Device in Device manager. That actually did the trick, the latency bars in DPC Latency Checker were all green. Xperfs DPC view showed the same story, with dxgkrnl.sys not even being in the list. With further reading I learned that the Standard VGA Graphics Drivers doesn't communicate with dxgkrnl.sys. I now thought that I've got a drivererror with the nvidia-drivers. So, I enabled the Graphics Card Device again, and the latency got back to 11-12ms spikes all over. Then I uninstalled the nvidiadrivers, and the DPC Latency Checker bars went green again.

However, I can't do without graphicsdrivers even if that would fix my soundsproblems. So, I installed an early version of nvidias drivers. That didn't do the trick, so I started going through the released drivers for my 8800GT, hoping for a fix. That's how far I've come at this point. No driver seems to fix my problem.

It's really starting to bug me, since I listen alot to music at my computer while studying and playing games, etc.

I hope a wise soul can help me with this matter.


Screens for xperf DPC view and DPC Latency Checker, with nvidia graphics drivers installed.
Notice dxgkrnl doing way to much DPC activity according to xperf, and all that red isn't good!

Screens for xperf DPC view and DPC Latency Checker, with nvidia graphics not installed.
And as soon as I uninstall the nvidia graphics drivers or disable the graphics card in device manager, no activity from dxgkrnl.sys in xperf, and all green bars in DPC Latency Checker.

PS. I've done all driver installs cleanly. Uninstalling the old drivers first, booting to safemode and using DriverSweeper to get rid of all the leftovers of the drivers. Rebooting, and installing other drivers.

EDIT: Didn't get the insert image option to work, so I've linked to the images instead.

 

yea also noticed this, when games have a "lag spike" bcs of GPU, sound does too xP.


luckily its almost not noticeable here, but have been searching for a fix during a long time, no luck.

my best trick was get graphics quality down (in sacred 2, grass, was a little buggy too, and in fallout3... had to set "High preset quality", it was running bad :nerd


PS: unistalling nvidia driver turns hardware acceleration off, so the GPU doesnt work (well it does, but under minimum settings, not much better than an intel crap one), aka "doesnt" fix your sound.

 

I don't see that at all. Here's the latency I get when playing Burnout Paradise with 8xFSAA and 16xAF at 1920x1200. I have an X-Fi XtremeMusic and it was in Game mode.

 

I think its related w bus usage, and thats on motherboard's design

i think :X

 

I think it's crappy on-board sound drivers.

 

I've tried a bunch of on-board sounddrivers before I started testing different graphicsdrivers. In the screens I've posted I don't have any sounddrivers installed. And It's all idle, the results. It's not the onboard since the Latency is showing even when the device is disabled.

So with graphicsdrivers installed and no load, crap. Without them, no load, excellent.

No clue what to try next, really.

 

Try disabling the onboard sound in the BIOS.

Also, kernel mode drivers may interfere. What kind of antivirus and firewall software are you running?

 

Just about to hit the bed, but hit the forums to check if someone got sugestions.

Ah, I forgot to mention that, Bludd. I've already tried with disabling the onboard sound through BIOS. No difference.

My antivirus is Avira AntiVir Personal, and the firewall I'm using is COMODO Firewall.

 

shot of my 2nd PC stats with the so called "crappy" onboard sound (Realtek HD Alc885) which isn't crappy at all and 8800GTX with latest 182.46 beta in XP 64bit



win

edit: green also on my main rig with ATI + X-FI pc

edit 2: tried playing mp3s and videos simultaneusly and both pc's stayed green.

edit 3: played HAWX for 5 min, only 1 yellow spike which is within range, that was on the 2nd rig with the REALTEK HD, i suppose the X-Fi will be the same so i won't test.

nice tool.

 

Khazim. It's your motherboard, sorry to say. Gigabyte has a well known problem with their p35/p45/x48 boards. Hit up anandtech forums or xtremesystems.org forums and search dpc latency and gigabyte . I had the exact same issues, listening to mp3s and scrolling a web page caused audio stuttering and it only got worse from there. I did find that the 169.23 drivers for your vid card (which worked quite well) stopped the problem completely for my rig. In the end I got pissed off and ditched that p35 ds3r for this asus p5q and no longer have any latency issues.

 

Nvidia Drivers Causing Spikes In Latency...
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=264258

 

Thank you for trying to help me out here. It's well appreciated. First, to zifnab. I've stumbled over some of those posts too, and I guess I was hoping it is not the case. I don't really want to spend the cash on a new motherboard before the next time I'll upgrade my CPU and RAM to go with it. And my system should run fine quite some time yet, I believe. I guess I have to start looking for a new motherboard, while testing what little I can come to think of that can be at fault here for me, besides the motherboard being the culprit. Also, the drivers you specified, 169.23. I couldn't find them at nvidias website. I did however try version 169.02 and 169.25 and the fault is as big as before.

To Cybermancer. I've thought about the drivers being the culprit, but as I said before I've tried a whole bunch of drivers. I'm not saying that I'm right believeing that it's not them at all, but I feel it's highly unlikely at this point. I've tried these drivers in the last few days, and can't see any difference at all in the spikes:
WHQL: 169.02, 169.25, 175.16, 175.19, 181.22, 182.06, 182.08
BETA: 174.74, 182.46

 

Khazim, have you tried uninstalling your vid drivers, shutting down, move the graphics card to the 2nd pci x16 slot and reinstalling drivers? I read once that it helps a lot on the giga x48 boards if you arent using sli.

 

Oh. That I haven't tried. Will do so now though. Thanks for the tip!

Just reinstalled windows to check it the latencyis there at once. And it is, well, after installing the vid drivers. With nothing else installed.

EDIT: Now I've tried your suggestion, zifnab. Sorry to say, it didn't do any difference. DPC Latency still peaking at 11-12ms almost all the time. Thanks for the advice anyhow though.

I wonder why this is happening. If it is a motherboardproblem, like it seems to be. I mean. Does it have to do with the PCI-E buses or something like that?

I'm not that educated when it comes to how it all works, technically, inside the computer.

 

Yeah like Cyber said, a few people have had your complaint.

My suggestion would be to go get a cheap PCI soundcard, that should fix it..

 

I've been close to buying myself a PCI soundcard, but I don't think that it's what's at fault here since I get the same spikes even when I have onboard sound deactivated in the BIOS.

 

Well i fked around with this tool n found that nvidia network driver (N ALSO NETWORK BUS ENUMERATOR )in device manger spike when u disable it n enable it spikes in red about 4000 n disabling creative sound card enable it shot up in red to 16000 n even off the cart. Starting a game only went up 4000 .closing game out only yellow 1000... So for me its network drivers n sound card that uses the most dpc latency... How u go about tring to fix the issue is a puzzle to me. Also enabling n disabling sli didnt have much affect on anything. Game spikes where the same... AS JUST NOTICED THAT CLCIKING ON RIVATURNER N EVGA PERISON TOOL CAUSES YELLOW LAG SPIKES

 

I read an article over at NFHQ where they said that certain NIC drivers caused reduced throughput on the SATA ports.

 

Does the new Gigabyte X58 has this problem too? (i see that its happening on ur X48)

 

1. Find out what your onboard interrupt sharing is, this will usually be in your motherboard manual (either printed or downloaded pdf). This tells you what hardware actually shared on the HARDWARE level.

2. Use a utility to check your IRQ allocation, there's many ways to go about this using 3rd party apps or just go into Device Manager and use "View Resources by Type" in the top menu and then expand the Interrupt Request (IRQ) portion and type out your full list here for us to review.

3. Go into your BIOS on boot and disable things that you will NEVER use, like onboard parallel & serial ports for instance.

4. Try updating your onboard audio drivers using ones directly from the Realtek website. Just go to downloads and HD Audio Codecs or w/e it is. Their driver is pretty universal, split only into HD & "AC97" versions.

5. The DPC interrupts you see when using NVidia drivers versus the 'stock' MS drivers are because when you have Nvidia drivers installed and working the "Aero" interface is going to be using the gpu to do compositing, even when you have it in the mode where full "Aero" transparency is disabled. Removing the drivers entirely switches the Vista/Win7 interface into software render mode and just fills the graphics card's output buffer with the cpu handling all the work.

This would depend entirely on what resources they share (both at the hardware and interrupt level). Wireless cards are actually some of the worst culprits when it comes to DPC Latency reports. People who use laptops for audio production & live performance are used to using this tool to diagnose the issue, and usually just wind up disabling wireless during performance/produciton & re-enabling during web surfing.