Nvidia Drivers Causing Spikes In Latency...

I have a Gateway P-6860 FX and when I run the DPC Latency Checker everything seems to be fine nice steady green bars. When I open up VirtualDJ and load up a music video the Latency Checker jumps up into yellow and peaks in red frequently. I have nothing else hooked up and have tried dissabling all kinds of hardware items. When I dissable my 8800m gts the spikes go away. This tells me it has something to do with the driver! Is this being addressed? I am a DJ and hope to get this laptop working for use with mixing music videos. Any help would be apreciated.

(When using an external soundcard the spikes create audio distortion. The external soundcard works fine when I am just using mp3's but when I load a music video is where I develope problems in audio.)

 

Wow. I never even heard of that tool. Looks interesting.

Besides seeing those spikes in the DPC Latency Checker, do you experience any problems? Have you tried the latest driver, the 177.26, yet? It seems to be a pretty good release.

 

what I am experiencing is audio crackles and pops which will not allow me to do live audio. when I have my external soundcard attached to my laptop running VirtualDJ and ONLY use mp3's the sound is fine. Once I had a music video to the program is when the spikes occur. Once the graphics card kicks in and the videos start going the pops and crackles occur. The graphics card is taking too long to communicate which causes audio drop outs which result from high latency issues.

 

Thanks for giving some details, DJKapitalkev.

Hm. The only thing I can think of, would be to reduce visual effects in the OS or try the latest graphic card and chipset drivers. Otherwise you might have to use a more powerful computer. I don't know how work intensive it is, whatever you're doing.

 

I dont think its that intensive! I used this program on my old toshiba single core 1.4 intel processor laptop with just 1 gig of ram and a shared 128 mb graphics card and everything worked fine except video. the graphics card couldnt handle the load using an external screen. I figure i would buy a laptop with a better graphics card and problem solved but it doesnt look that way. :bang: I was leaning to beleive that the problem was my firewire sound card was having IRQ issues with the video card both on the same IRQ. But with a clean install and my external soundcard hooked up I clearly see the latency spikes still when the video card is being used. When the system is just on the desktop screen there is no problems, when i run virtualdj there is no problems, when i load a video and I assume this is when the video drivers kick in is when the spikes jump! Can anyone test while playing a game if they get the DPC spikes?

 

LOL

I just thought to myself: "Hm. Why not. Help him out." and downloaded that tool to check the latency in games.

I just started the tool and this is how it looks like:



No games, no music, nothing running at all! I don't trust that tool at all now. (My system is running perfectly fine in all games and benchmarks. I think. )

 

no this tool is very good! its designed to show you of issues in your computer that would prevent you from doing audio recordings and things of that nature! i will tell you now if you were to go into your hardware settings and dissable your wifi it would drop dramatically! and bet if you disable your video card it would be in the green stable. there is something going on with these drivers that are causing issues that prevent me from using my external soundcard. dissable those two items and see what it looks like.

 

as far as performance these drivers work great on what they are doing with visuals and game settings! its just something within them isnt working well or playing nice with latency which will cause audio dropouts if you were to hook your system up to a surround sound device.

 

I don't have WiFi. You mean my NIC?

Sorry, but I just installed the 177.26 driver yesterday and I'm not going to disable it in order to test the latency difference. Sorry. Maybe somebody else will do it, though...

 

no i didnt want you to uninstall the driver! I went under my device manager and dissbled my video card drivers for a minute to test then just went back in and enabled them. when i did that the red peaks went away which is why I am saying something with the drivers are causing this

 

cybermancer: You will find that the tool is actually very accurate

DJKapitalkev: You do know the tool actually is designed to read the latency of the PCI Bus, right? Why dont you try playing with your latency settings (there is a tool out that lets you play with them although i forgot the name)

Also have you considered that the problem may lie with your external sound card?

Its highly unlikely to be the Nvidia drivers causing massive amounts of latency and crackl pops, im afraid, you may not believe me but its true.

 

Shoot! This means I have to disable each and every service to find out what is causing this latency in my system? I don't think I'm going to do that. I don't even have any problems with my system. Is this latency problem even worth to research, Passion Fruit?

 

Unless you suffer with crackles and pops in mp3 and video slowdown when listening to mp3s/watching videos, then no, you dont need to do a thing unless it effects your listening or viewing pleasure

 

*Sigh*

Did you hear that stone drop (from my chest), Passion Fruit?

I already started to get worried.

 

passionfruit! The reason I know it has to be my nvidia driver is this!

Without my external soundcard hooked up and nothing running at all just my desktop displayed the latency tester shows in green steady around 100 maybe jumps to 200. I start up my virtual dj program still everything fine. I load up mp3 file still good to go. I load up a music video file (mp4) and this is when the spikes occur. I did think it was my soundcard but it isnt even hooked up when this occurs.

I can keep my soundcard hooked up and run mp3's fine but anything that requires the video card to kick in creates the spikes. If I knew how to take those pictures like he did of his screen i would show you 3 pictures 1) with nothing running 2) with just mp3's running and 3) one which requires the video card to kick in.

I just want the developers and people creating these drivers to be aware of this.

 

That's actually pretty simple:

1.) Whenever you want to take a screenshot, just press the "Prt Scr" key.
2.) Now open MS Paint (or any other graphic software) and select "edit" => "paste".
3.) Save the image as an *.jpeg file and upload it to http://imageshack.us/
4.) Copy the provided link from ImageShack and put it in your post.

 

divx+window media player is fine

what does it mean though? o_o

 

Afaik, the green bars are ok, the yellow and red ones (which you don't have) indicate a high latency which might result in those problems DJKapitalkev is trying to solve.

 

Most likely whatever you are trying to play, requires the video card to decode (purevideo thingy maybe) thus causing the latency.

you say mp4 files? I'll try to find some and check.


>< i thought i added this to my old post, not create a new one o_o

edit again: nope, .mp4 files still shows green-yellow bars
maybe its the driver? i'm using 174.74 on Vista 32Bit

it is not the CPU load either, i ran prime and the latency was still fine.
interestingly, when i run a stress test, the latency actually remain green and almost never become yellow x_x



more load = better latency hmm...

weird.... but fun

 

I also have probs with the 175 and 177 nv drivers with some pro audio situations. I can't quite pin it down the errors don't occur with driver versions before 175. But its interesting to see some one else that has seen a prob with low latency audio. I'll have to try with some audio gear plugged into this machine to test , this machine is running onboard sound at the moment. oh the 175.16 whql , seemed to run fine.