Does GRID2 need a revision for Pascal cards and nVidia drivers?

[BonzaiDuck]

I have taken my time so far, just as I planned to, in building a Z170 Skylake system.

The dGPU is the Gigabyte GTX 1070 OC "Mini." Even as I'd overclocked the processor, I hadn't touched the graphics card and its settings -- planning to fiddle with it later.

So with all this time, patience, and tedious toil, I'm looking for any little problem I can find. But there's nothing wrong with the hardware, the drivers, OS configuration -- any of it.

GRID2 has momentary freezes here and there, and I thought I'd seen forum posts elsewhere in which people complained about momentary freezes with this game and a GTX 1070 card of any kind. Maybe I'd seen one, two or three instances of such mentions. About the best advice I read about it was a hopeful recommendation to "wait for the latest NVidia driver release."

Now I'm sure it's not the graphics card, because Assetto Corsa runs robustly without flaw; I can run Heaven or Valley Benchmark and Furmark against the Gigabyte card, and it behaves just as it's supposed to. there are no video or audio anomalies.

With GRID2, there's the occasional momentary freeze with no BSOD, event-log indications or the program actually crashing.

I've run the "optimize" feature of GeForce Experience for GRID2 to no effect. Tried playing with the resultant "optimized" parameters, but with no luck so far. I've re-installed the game twice.

Parallel to this, once I've entered the GRID2 menus, the audio begins to exhibit a low-level hum -- which takes some effort to recognize, but it's there, and it continues through the game session -- less noticeable for the games own sound effects.

Any thoughts or advice about this?

Oh. Almost forgot. This is with the game running under Win 7 64-SP1 in a dual-boot system with Win 10. I was still installing drivers for Win 10 today, and need to install the game under that OS to see if the same thing happens.

I wondered if it might have something to do with DirectX, but I can't see why that would be part of any scenario.

 

[shortylickens]

I dont know.

Works just fine on my GTX 980.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I dont know.

Works just fine on my GTX 980.

And ditto with my 2x GTX 970's. But if everything else works fine on my GTX 1070, it's not the Pascal card. It can only be some software glitch pertaining to the new Pascal card, with this particular game.

Here's yet another mention of it at Overclockers that describes it perfectly:

http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php/754637-NVIDIA-Virtual-Audio-Device

It seems we have an ongoing thread in "motherboards" about DPC latency. Whether that's an issue, it cannot be anything but software-related if I can run Assetto Corsa day and night flawlessly, with no audio effect like the one I described. The poster has a Geforce 980 card.

Meanwhile, I have more and more trouble replicating the sort of half-second freezes described by that poster. Any hesitation is shorter and less disruptive to game-play -- you can hardly notice them. And it may happen one time in a "custom event" or a single "career" race. I must have played 10 races since early this morning, and I think I only saw it happen twice.

I disabled the HD NVidia devices in Device Manager that are associated with the graphics card. The barely perceptible hum continues until I exit the game. it doesn't exist with Assetto Corsa or anything else I've tried thus far.

UPDATE: This isn't conclusive, but the troubles are apparently due to settings in the "Manage 3D" options of NVidia Control Panel. Performance settings, multi- or single-monitor and so on. It's beginning to seem likely, since the reports of this never end in any conclusive recommendations about drivers -- although the 3D settings are mentioned and advised. I've run through several races in the game without a freeze or a frame dropout. I think it's fixed. We're gonna see, I guess . . .