A call to ALL Nvidia owners - It's time to check our latency

[Annisman*]

If you've been following the Pascal saga you will know that the cards launched with a number of flaws. One of the flaws that has been found is an increase of DPC latency caused by Nvidia drivers at the kernel level.

At first I assumed that it only affected 10** series cards, but curiosity got the best of me and I also tested my brother's PC with an OG Titan (7*** series) The results are not good. High latency in both idle and gaming situations. This is on a fresh W7 64 install, I have tested the last two Nvidia drivers and they both produce the same latency results, using DDU to make sure everything is clean between driver installs.

I want to know if this is an inherent problem with all nvidia cards.

To check your own results is very easy and quick. Simply download LatencyMon and observe how high the numbers get in both idle and gaming, 5 minutes of both will tell you if you suffer from hidden latency. (Ignore the bottom numbers about pagefaults)

http://www.resplendence.com/latencymon

Please post your results, this is something that all users will want to know as DPC latency can give you ultimately a substandard experience without knowing it (think micro-stutter).

There is a hot-fix driver for 10** series cards as posted in another thread, this resolved most of my issues on my GTX 1080 but as far as I know only 10** series owners can use it. https://forums.geforce.com/default/...ivers/announcing-geforce-hotfix-driver-368-95

 

[Bacon1]

You might want to show examples of "good" vs "bad" results so people know what to look for.

 

[nitromullet]

Doesn't exactly take a rocket scientist to figure out that nvlddmkm.sys is causing latency.

GTX 1070:

edit: I guess I should say "was" causing latency. Here's another screen shot after installing the Hotfix driver:

 

[tonyfreak215]

What does the higher latency affect?

 

[Flapdrol1337]

Doesn't seem to do it on my gtx670.

I have windows powerplan on "high performance" though.

 

[Wall Street]

What does the higher latency affect?

It can impact general performance, but the most commonly noted symptom is that your audio will pop because the audio driver will have to wait too long waiting for its deferred procedure call to be processed and the audio buffer will run empty.

 

[Beer4Me]

Nope, not installing some random software to check this. Have GTX 980 with power profile set to High Performance, have never experienced stuttering or audio drop-outs ever. System config in sig.

Previously I did own a R9 270x, and I did experience stuttering with that card, but it was intermittent and somewhat rare.

 

[nitromullet]

It can impact general performance, but the most commonly noted symptom is that your audio will pop because the audio driver will have to wait too long waiting for its deferred procedure call to be processed and the audio buffer will run empty.

Yep, this is compounded when recording or working with multi-tracked audio files. I actually find it odd that none of the youtubers that reviewed Pascal noticed this (or didn't mention it), since a number of them use condenser mics and audio interfaces when making videos.

I haven't had any issues with general usage or gaming, but the first time I fired up Ableton Live after installing my Pascal card it was clear that something was amiss with the latency. It's possible that some youtubers have dedicated rigs for making their videos, but I still find it hard to believe that none of them ran into any issues.

 

[railven]

I'm bored, I'm running the test.

EDIT:

Seems fine for me

 

[Adul]

Running a GTX 970, not showing any issues. But I haven't updated to latest driver either.

 

[Annisman*]

Any OG Titan owners have results ?

 

[nerp]

Looks like the issue is being resolved with newer drivers out today and going forward so pretty much a non-issue (unless it's not fully fixed yet).

 

[Madpacket]

I already started a thread on this last week.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2479883

**Edit NM, I see you're alao asking about non 10x0 Nvidia cards as well.

I think this issue is mainly affecting 10x0 cards and not really older cards. At least not in the same volumes.

 

[Annisman*]

Yeah, after discovering the OG Titan had latency I wanted to know how deep the rabbit hole really went.

 

[Raising]

If my 1080 is idling at low clocks there's latency spikes with the latest drivers, doesn't happen when idle clocks are higher if I change my desktop from 120 to 144hz.

I'll keep my desktop at 120hz, haven't notice any "lag" or audio problems so far.

 

[Joepublic2]

My 970 isn't causing any latency spikes playing witcher 3. Windows 10 running latest 368.81 drivers.

 

[BFG10K]

Results from my original 6GB Titan (driver 350.12):

I don't have any issues in games though, but maybe once a week I'll get a single stutter in iTunes music playback.

 

[hawtdawg]

I've noticed DPC latency problems since at least the 7xx series. This problem people are saying exists with the 1xxx is no different that what I've seen the entire time I've been using Nvidia cards since Kepler. I've had SLI the whole time so I don't know if that was a factor. I've never had judderless/stutterless Flash playback through a browser, and i think it could be a cause. I've never noticed it having an effect on gaming/sound cutouts though.

 

[kagui]

theory: GDRR5X increase latency
doubling the data before moving it, increase latency.
No data just a theory.
Easy way of testing if you are gonna have problems test, SVP media player latency test.

 

[Madpacket]

One thing that would be interesting to measure - if this DPC latency affects professional gamers in any way? Wonder if there's a way to measure that?

 

[Annisman*]

Interesting, another OG Titan showing latency.

 

[dogen1]

My pc is showing high interrupt to process latency(dual core pentium + gtx 950). I haven't noticed any issues though.

 

[thxdd]

With hotfix drivers 368.95, I am still seeing huge latency spikes - single 1080.

 

[thxdd]

To be more specific:

 

[railven]

Does this have anything to do with what type of audio configuration you may use?

For example, I use dedicated hardware (not onboard) which has it's own processing units (ie not relying on CPU clocks).

Just curious.