Nvidia Drivers Causing Spikes In Latency...

cette, see with the onboard sound on this laptop I really cant hear any distortion or problems but the latency spikes are there! I dont hear it until i hook up my soundcard. The reason I know its not my soundcard is if I just run mp3's in the virtualdj program all is fine no distortion or problems latency stays in green! when i load up a video mp4,vob,avi is when the spikes occur and my sound starts to distort.

 

passionfruit: the program that lets you change bus latency is double dawg i beleive. I am using vista and that is for XP The problem exists when I do not have my soundcard hooked and only happens when I enable a video which requires the video driver.

sniper: is that driver your using compatible with vista 64?

 

IRQ 16 Mobile Intel(R) PM965/GM965/GL960 Express PCI Express Root Port - 2A01 OK
IRQ 16 NVIDIA GeForce 8800M GTS OK
IRQ 16 Intel(R) ICH8 Family USB Universal Host Controller - 2834 OK
IRQ 16 Intel(R) ICH8 Family PCI Express Root Port 1 - 283F OK
IRQ 16 Intel(R) ICH8 Family PCI Express Root Port 5 - 2847 OK
IRQ 16 AGERE OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller OK


all these are on the same IRQ which I know will cause problems if I use my 1394(firewire) sound card! I am still having issues with latency spikes with no soundcard and only when I activate a video file.

I researched the PCI Latency Tool seems to be something I am looking for but see it isnt designed for PC Express which I beleive is what the GeForce 8800m GTS is.

Is there a tool similar to the PCI Latency Tool that will allow me to change the bus latency in Vista on my 8800m gts?

I am using a Gateway P-6860 FX If That Information Is Helpful!

 

Are you using 177.26 driver ?

177.26 driver causes my setup* to show same bad "latency" issue ---> and occasionally got "clicks/pops" on audio of installed TV card !

Normal "all green" DPC latency display, and no sound problems using my previous 174.74 driver !


* Observed when using a P5N-E, E4300@3.4Ghz, 8800GT@700/1750/1000 WinXP SP3 setup !

 

Thanks for the heads up, jimmor!

I am, indeed, using the 177.26 (Vista x64, SP1). To be honest, I'm not that much impressed with them, as everybody else seems to be. Although, my system is running stable, I lost ~ 150 points in 3DMark06 (not so bad) and GRID isn't as fast anymore/hangs for about ~ 0.2 seconds sometimes (bad!)

I think, I'm going to wait on the 177.34 (if true) and test them. If they're like the 177.26 drivers, I'll go back to 175.51. They were the best for my system so far.

Thanks again, for mentioning that, jimmor!

 

try it out, hopefully it'll help
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x64_174.74_whql.html

 

No prob's !

Apart from the "occasional clicks/pops" and "very high" DPC latency readings, 177.26 provided very good IQ and generally appeared to work ok for my setup.

175.51, and every other previous driver I have tried, is however much better since no "clicks/pops" and DPC latencies always at low green levels!

The 177.26 issues with my G92 based card must be related to the driver only really being produced (and thus properly compat) to support the newer design GTX260 and GTX280 cards. Possibly even especially tweaked to give excellent gaming performance, regardless of any impact on Audio/Video streaming capabilities ---> meaning, probably nothing more than a GTX260/GTX280 Marketing/PR activity driver?

In other words, 177.26 was never expected to be a universal driver ---> and presumably, neither will 177.34 be ?

So unless Nvidia says otherwise, it appears that 175 series are still latest "usable" with G9x or previous cards?

 

I agree with that!

At least, I know now (or have an explanation for) what caused those high latencies on my PC, to close the circle and get back on topic.

 

This is definately caused by your Creative X-Fi sound card. I had exactly the same problem with mine and went back to onboard sound and my machines is fine. With the X-Fi card in it was cracking and popping. The drivers are just crap for creative at the moment. Dissable your sound card and see what happens. You will also fine when playing things like DVD video with CMSS enabled you will get popping and crackling.

There is a huge thread here on the creative forums with lots of pissed off people:

http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?board.id=soundblaster&thread.id=71962

I'd be interested to know what happens, kindest regards

Zoozer

EDIT: Another interesting link direct from creative: http://xfi.blogspot.com/2006/06/soundblaster-x-fi-crackling-and.html

 

well i installed windows xp on my system and it seems to have helped dramatically! i still get high jumps but they remain in green when using the video card. I havent had time to test my external soundcard but am happy to see this improvement reguardless.

 

i have the same problem o dpc spikes (around 1k) in windows 2003 (all editions)




Removing NVIDIA Drivers results in no more spikes...

On XP installations there are no problems, dpc latency hits a miximum of 30.

My system:

Intel Core2 Quad Q6600
Asus P5K Pro
Nvidia 7900GTX

 

Had the same problem with GF8800 GTS (G92) on Vista Ultimate 64 Bit.
IT IS NVIDIA DRIVER RELATED! And Nvidia is informed about this!

Well, with the latest driver (177.83) it was reduced a bit, so that the spikes wont hit the yellow mark during office activity. When it comes to games the dpc latencies go up again (not as bad as before but still there from time to time).

I recommend to install the 177.83 Drivers after a clean deinstall of the old drivers.

PS: It it definetly NOT my Audigy 2ZS, which i suspected first. (Checked EVERY DEVICE by deactivating them one by one in the device manager. Deinstalling NVIDIA Drivers completly fixed dpc latency issues!

As Nvidia was officially informed about the issues by manufacturers of other devices, which were suspected to cause those problems, i'm hoping they get their a..es up and finally fix it completly!!!

 

i just found out that spiking happens when IDLE.

i run a Prime95 stress test on all the 4 cores of my cpu and wow, spikes went away.

Energy saving related?

 

177.83 whql didn't had spikes for me, everything at 30-80

 

Turn off C1E in the bios.

 

I can reccomend doing that as default, that crap is teh devil!!!

 

Hmmm...this is actually a very interesting find. Has anyone attempted to test this tool against an ATI card to see if those latency spikes occur with them? If not, then this may explain some latency spiking issues on Age of Conan which smell of problems with the client and not the server or internet connection.

 

Just to clear this up -- DPC stands for Deferred Procedure Calls. It's a mechanism to allow deferring low priority jobs from a high priority task, mainly used for interrupts (IRQ services are deferred to tasks, hence Windows <> realtime). A higher latency shows an effect only on video/audio. A higher latency means that someone is hogging CPU resources, ie. a driver is creating a lot high priority DPC. Here's a short blurp.

 

Sure, that part is clear. But on the Age of Conan client, I don't believe the latency meter validates whether or not the interrupts are caused by a connection or a clock interrupt. To me it comes across as a cascading effect, in which some users report the client will switch to a single CPU core (which is a debug feature in the client) after a spike.