Nvidia Drivers Causing Spikes In Latency...

Hi guys,

I'm using the PC on the signature and 177.83/latest Physx drivers and latency for me it is "all green", all the way.

I use this pc for both games and sound/video recording (SONAR 7/Vegas 8) and I have recorded up to 9 guitar tracks on top of each other yesterday with these drivers and no abnormalities were found so far. I use the ASIO drivers and my latency is as low as 10ms, which is great for recording audio tracks and using DxI (DirectX Instruments).

I see that some above are talking about DPC and I would like to tell you what happened in my laptop, which has a similar Geforce board (8400M G):

Whenever Daemon Tools Lite (4.13 I think) is installed, one of my cores (core duo processor) is 25% busy all the time. After many weeks of reasearch I found through Process Explorer (task manager does not show that at all) that "Hardware Interrupts" were causing the 25% load on the core. Upon disabling Dtools' virtual IDE controller on the device manager (it automatically changes its name all the time), the load would drop to 0% (normal), therefore, I am 100% sure that it is DTools which caused such headache.

And whenever I tried to record audio/watch movies/listen to music on my laptop, these audio peaks/distortions would appear and I would need to raise the latency to almost unrecordable levels (which led the audio tracks to get out of sync during recording, which is the worst thing that can happen to music...lol).

I never really complained about it to Dtools developers' because I am in fact too lazy to keep reproducing the problem and taking screenshots and so in order to prove it to DTools team that this issue occurs, and in any event, I keep Dtools installed and only disable the controller; once in a while, when I need to mount some image (very rare) I turn it on, use the PC with the annoying "Hardware Interrupts" and turn it off as soon as I finished installing from the virtual drive, so that's no big deal for me...

I hope it can help you solve your issue, Mr. DJ..

 

I'm using these 177<a href="http://img513.imageshack.us/my.php?image=dpccd6.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://img513.imageshack.us/img513/9038/dpccd6.th.jpg" border="0" alt="Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us" /></a><br /><br /><a href="http://img604.imageshack.us/content.php?page=blogpost&files=img513/9038/dpccd6.jpg" title="QuickPost"><img src="http://imageshack.us/img/butansn.png" alt="QuickPost" border="0"></a> Quickpost this image to Myspace, Digg, Facebook, and others!.83 and here are my results

 

sorry,my mistake
I thought I was allowed to post attachments

 

You are, use the forum link, not the html one.

 

ok i'll try this one


By bigcid10 at 2008-08-13

 

score!

 

maybe gfx card shares same irq with sound card.
does't that cause major issues with any creative card ? ;>

hmmmm i'm sudenly curious to learn how whole sys internals thing works to.
as its alway's handy finding out whats causing certain issues ;p

 

Sorry to bump this thread.


getting these since short while if noticed i had problems.
ran tool since remember from this thread.

basicly hear sound pop and i see latency go sky rocket.
or even my sound totaly crackles away and vanishes then resumes after short time.
trying figure out whats causing thse latency issues altough not related probaly due 3d card probaly.
as i un installed driver cleaned and tested while wheren't installed also.
basicly happend still.
do those latency's only happen with bad drivers or can be caused by faulty hardware asswell ?
or bad ram.
or bad hdd.
or even bad mainboard ?

 

I'm a musician, for comparison here's what my audio tuned pc looks like (winxp sp3, specs as on the left);




This is without moving the mouse. I like to use software like guitar rig 3, reaper, fruity loops etc.

The problem is usually from something accessing the cpu, keep looking. If in doubt, disconnect internet line, disable anti-virus and firewall and check again.

 

I've uploaded a small zip file to esnips for download that has a few files with loads of hints and tips. Should help anyone wishing to tweak xp.

http://www.esnips.com/doc/3358bef4-c080-4dff-b226-594a9a903316/Daw-tuning-Tips-Collection

Main ones to check out is the musicxp.net, super tweak guide and tip 25.

It maybe for audio workstations but most of it is relevant to gaming pc tuning aswell.

Good luck!

Karl

 

There are some tips at my site as well if you are using Vista:

http://www.meap.biz/forum/viewforum.php?f=7

(I am a producer btw my full time job).

 

Problem solved

Hello, i have almost the same problem,
180.84 and 181.00 BETA drivers have this issue only in FarCry2 and when i play video files with media player classic...
and for a 100% fix is the 169.21 video card driver...
this is for me, you can try it... and post if it didn't or did work... if you have another fix please let me know...


EDIT: all 17x.xx and 18x.xx drivers has the issue, at least for me, i reported the problem to nvidia, since 175.19... but no clear response from them... but the drivers seems to improve, as i said 18x.xx only two applications have sound corruption...

and of course Crysis has the issue to, but i didn't tested before


i have solved the sound corruption, first i changed the onboard sound card with a creative one (this didn't change anything), and then it remains only the cpu and the mainboard, so i changed the cpu first (the one with 800 fsb with another one with 1333 fsb) and the issue is gone, so that was for me the 800 mhz fsb (the cpu worked well on another mainboard)
this was by far the most strange problem, and the way that i solved is also strange, but nothing else worked.... so recommend <if you can> try with another cpu, before you buy another one to see what happens...
good luck!!!

 

Ok ladies, enough spreading half-knowledge here!

DPC Latencies are a complex matter and their origin is usually based on several drivers in a system. The most prominent culprits are CPU Speedsteping, (W)Lan drivers, USB card-readers, ACPI Battery driver (check for regular spikes every 15s) and last but not least the graphic-card.

With NVidia drivers it depends on which GPU is used in your system. For example, my 7800GT wont produce any prominent DPC latencies while in 2D mode while my 9600M GT produces really ugly bad DPC spikes. These will increase alot once a 2D application with dynamic GUI elements is used (Browser, DAW, whatever)! The later is only solveable by forcing the 9600M GT into 3D mode (low-power 3D is suffient for 2D applications) via Rivatuner!

Another culprit for DPC Latency spikes with NVidia drivers is dynamic clock-rate/performance-level switching. Whenever the driver switches down the clock-rates of the GPU an extremely huge DPC spike and thus audio drop-outs can happen!

CPU Speedsteping is the reason why DPCs may look better/greener with constant CPU load like Prime95. Strangely on my setups it only seems to happen with Vista 32, while Vista 64 and W7 32 and 64 are not affected.

In general you should be able to get the lowest possible DPC Latencies with XP (downto 2 us), while Vista will allow averages well below 100 us, but W7 may cross over 100 us from time to time while using the very same hardware setup. In practice it doesn't matter at all as long as DPCs are well around 100 us! So Audio performance can reach the very same level on all three platforms.

This is what a properly setup Vista should look like (forced 3D mode):




This is what a properly setup Windows 7 should look like (forced 3D mode):



Hopefully NVidia will fix 2D mode DPCs anytime soon! Please use the time-limited Feedback form for mobile drivers offered on NVidia's homepage.

 

im getting audio cracking n poping to even when my system is off.i have to turn power off to volume control on my desk to get rid of this nosie .. I never had audio cracking b4.

 

Hmm, this is what my windows 7 32bit build 7000 partially audio-tweaked looks like.

Running all updates and Nvidia 182.08 vista 32bit version.

I took a snap of my whole desktop for a fuller comparison. Specs on the left.

 

Well I'm glad this thread is around...

I'm also in the pro-audio/studio realm of users experiencing DPC issues. I experience the exact clicks and pops as other users have mentioned. I have pinned my experience directly to OpenGL graphics.

In the below image you will see DPC latency spikes as high as 900 microseconds between -30 and -15 seconds. In this time-frame I had a couple OpenGL-based plugins viewable (Waves SSL Channels). At -15 seconds I closed all of those windows and the spikes disappeared.

With RivaTuner I can disable the OpenGL acceleration ONLY, and upon doing so all my problems disappear. However, the graphics get way too laggy and interrupt workflow.

Short of switching video card brands I have tried everything mentioned in this thread...
- 175.19, 177.83, 178.13, 181.20, 182.08
- RivaTuner Low-Power3D tweaks

What a pain.

 

185.85 user here, both under XP and 7 RC (build 7100), both 32 bit editions. I only tested the DPC tool under 7 though. Opened a bunch of 720p videos and remained under 500µs in performance mode. Heck, even in savings mode, I get yellow bars at worst — just a little above 1000µs.

 

Unfortunately anything over about 200 microseconds results in a click. Argh. It has been suggested to try a "crappy ATI" card. Any thoughts?

 

SOLVED:

GeForce/ION Driver Release 186 (aka 186.18)

This driver finally solved the problem mentioned in the original post for my 9400GT. No extra tweaking required. All I did was uninstall 182 -> reboot -> run driver sweeper -> reboot -> install 186.18 -> working.

YES!