Discussion: NVIDIA Display Driver (nvlddmkm.sys) DPC Latency

[Taosd]

That txt log doesn't have the "Drivers" tab included, unfortunately when exporting txt through LatencyMon they made it so that only the currently selected tab gets exported, rather than all of them. So I can't compare the DPC Counts to Necrosaro's. This page does show though that you have a lot of hard pagefaults, and that McAfee is for sure slowing down the network adapter and causing DPC issues for several drivers.

Pagefaults can be reduced dramatically by disabling indexer and/or pagefile. McAffee and Defender are big contributors too.

no probs. before i do chipset i'll run again

 

[Hellbovine]

Anyone else following this thread, if you could please reply and fill in the basic computer specs (link) and if you can also attach a txt log of a 5 minute LatencyMon of the "Drivers" tab, I think it will go a long way in figuring out the problem. Right now we have 3 people that don't have Nvidia issues and happen to be on AMD processors, so if this trend continues then we may make some progress toward a solution. Even if that solution is to ditch Intel until they fix their crap for W10 and W11 it's at least helping us identify the problem and find closure.

My laptop battery is about to die on me and I should get going for the night, I'll check back in tommorow though and keep working on this. Thank you everyone that's participating in this thread, I've gotten a renewed vigor this week to tackle this after getting all of this additional info from people.

 

[Taosd]

here we go. slight variation but all there

 

[Audionot]

Hey all, Doing a new build for audio production and gaming. DPC spikes have long been a vex!

I did the list of things here:

- Disable HDCP in Nvidia driver
- Try different Nvidia drivers
- Disable unused devices in Bios
- Put graphics card in MSI mode
- Use high performance power plan
- Disable Windows Defender-Didn't do this!
- Set Nvidia control panel to maximum performance
- Changing HPET settings

I'm definitely noticing an improvement, though I can't quantify it with high precision as the spike behavior is somewhat irregular. Nice thread though and I wanted to help if I could! The previous test I was running only had a high spike of 257us. Go figure...

TROUBLESHOOTING TEMPLATE
PC Type: Desktop
Operating System/Version: Windows 10 64-bit 22H2
Processor:i9-13900k
Graphics: RTX 3070
Driver Type: DCH
Driver Version: 527.37
DPC Spikes: Hard to say. sometimes a test will have ~500-600 and higher

 

[Hellbovine]

here we go. slight variation but all there

This one was interesting because things got worse. Nvidia spiked up to 905 microseconds which is not good. It makes me wonder now if we take a machine that has good DPC, reboot, run a 5 min test, and repeat this say 10 times, how many of them would end up having spiking issues. In other words, if the load is getting rebalanced with every reboot then sometimes a specific boot will behave poorly, which helps explain why this issue varies so much.

 

[Taosd]

yeah dunno why , i had shut down all background apps i could but left av on cause it is a pain in the a$$ to terminate in services. sadly it hasnt got a 1 click shuts it all down mode, apart from uninstall .........

 

[Hellbovine]

Hey all, Doing a new build for audio production and gaming. DPC spikes have long been a vex!

In your report the Nvidia driver is great, but wdf01000 is really quite bad with massive DPC Counts. I don't know what ntsokrnl and wdf01000 really are under the hood, since these are like "catch all" processes. Antivirus software is a huge contributor to overall DPC issues though, and a large factor in other related problems, such as hard pagefaults, stuttering and being disconnected from things like voice chat or straight up being kicked out of a game mid-match, etcetera.

You can add software exceptions into Defender, but the real time scanning is always going to be a problem because it's targeting the whole operating system, drivers, network adapter, and software like games. You said you didn't disable Defender, so that's probably the issue there. There's a reason older operating systems didn't have as many issues, because all this realtime monitoring didn't exist back then by default, or to the degree it is today. Gaming and security in general just really aren't compatible and never have been.

I'm quite certain if you and Taosd both disable your antiviruses at least just temporarily for testing purposes that the numbers will be dramatically different. I don't want this thread to devolve into security arguements though since that topic is ultra polarizing, I'm just stating the data, it's up to each person to decide how they want to address it.

While Microsoft didn't explicitly say W10 22H2 was affected (link) and it might be that 22H2 is the culprit. Microsoft may have purposely avoided mentioning W10 because they want to urge people to switch over to W11.

 

[Taosd]

i'm up do

In your report the Nvidia driver is great, but wdf01000 is really quite bad with massive DPC Counts. I don't know what ntsokrnl and wdf01000 really are under the hood, since these are like "catch all" processes. Antivirus software is a huge contributor to overall DPC issues though, and a large factor in other related problems, such as hard pagefaults, stuttering and being disconnected from things like voice chat or straight up being kicked out of a game mid-match, etcetera.

You can add software exceptions into Defender, but the real time scanning is always going to be a problem because it's targeting the whole operating system, drivers, network adapter, and software like games. You said you didn't disable Defender, so that's probably the issue there. There's a reason older operating systems didn't have as many issues, because all this realtime monitoring didn't exist back then by default, or to the degree it is today. Gaming and security in general just really aren't compatible and never have been.

I'm quite certain if you and Taosd both disable your antiviruses at least just temporarily for testing purposes that the numbers will be dramatically different. I don't want this thread to devolve into security arguements though since that topic is ultra polarizing, I'm just stating the data, it's up to each person to decide how they want to address it.

While Microsoft didn't explicitly say W10 22H2 was affected, it might be that 22H2 is the issue:
https://www.neowin.net/news/microso...ance-issues-on-windows-11-22h2-blocks-update/

Microsoft may have purposely avoided mentioning W10 because they want to urge people to switch over to W11.

I'm up for giving it a shot. i can uninstall mcaf ........ do another 5 min run see the difference
I have defender turned off and just use mcafee. what i mean is, i have defender off, and just use mcafee for av
I'm as curious as everyone else about why some are having the issues and others aren't

 

[Taosd]

i'm up do

I'm up for giving it a shot. i can uninstall mcaf ........ do another 5 min run see the difference
I have defender turned off and just use mcafee. what i mean is, i have defender off, and just use mcafee for av
I'm as curious as everyone else about why some are having the issues and others aren't

back in about 10

 

[Taosd]

back in about 10

hookay .........

 

[AeonX]

Right now we have 3 people that don't have Nvidia issues and happen to be on AMD processors

I have an old intel processor (i5 4690) and a very basic motherboard (Asus H81M-C) and apparently no problems here but I tweak Windows heavily and remove many components with NTLite, and I don't use antivirus. I use an old update too, version 19043.1237 (KB5005565 - September 14, 2021).

The last updates are very unstable and full of problems, they could be the culprits.

I'll do a clean install with the ISO updated to the latest (not preview) november updates and as soon as I can I'll post my results here.

 

[Taosd]

I have an old intel processor (i5 4690) and a very basic motherboard (Asus H81M-C) and apparently no problems here but I tweak Windows heavily and remove many components with NTLite, and I don't use antivirus. I use an old update too, version 19043.1237 (KB5005565 - September 14, 2021).

The last updates are very unstable and full of problems, they could be the culprits.

I'll do a clean install with the ISO updated to the latest (not preview) november updates and as soon as I can I'll post my results here.

i had read somewhere , think it might have been on reddit or something, that a lot of people had been having issues since 1809 ......

 

[Hellbovine]

Drivers.txt

At first glance this looks similar to the previous one, but if you throw them into a Google sheets the data is easier to discern. Comparing this one to the previous one with McAfee it looks like Defender turned part of itself back on automatically. The WdFilter.sys shows up now, but didn't when McAfee was installed, but this is by Microsoft's design, it's supposed to turn on and off based on 3rd party antivirus.

The latest txt file without McAfee gives you 113,121 total DPC Counts and 597.36 seconds of total latency.
The previous txt with McAfee file gives you 147,784 total DPC counts and 752.51 seconds of total latency.

Nvidia spiked up to 905 ms on the McAfee version, and only went up to 244 ms in the latest.

Lower numbers is best for both stats. McAfee was definitely having an effect. Pretty much anything else you start to disable from here will continue to decrease the numbers further. Whether it's removing components in NTLite or using reg keys to toggle things, etcetera.

I've been revisiting Google again to see if anyone discovered anything new, or I could glean something better from the posts now that we know more, and I'm still stuck... It seems to be a crapshoot, it's so unpredictable. I think until something new comes to light all we can do is hope that someone stumbles on a fix as we continue to all work on tweaking our images and using NTLite, or until Microsoft/Nvidia fix this.

 

[Hellbovine]

i had read somewhere , think it might have been on reddit or something, that a lot of people had been having issues since 1809 ......

Yeah this is where my thoughts went today too. We can probably pinpoint what happened by doing something crazy, like downloading each major version from 1607 through 21H2, install them, then as soon as you hit the desktop export the full registry. Using DiffMerge we could then see what changed between each one. Something like this is just so time consuming though, so it's not practical. I'd sure learn a heck of a lot though and probably find some good hidden tweaks in the process, so a part of me is tempted to do it. I gotta work through my todo list first though before I consider that.

 

[Taosd]

At first glance this looks similar to the previous one, but if you throw them into a Google sheets the data is easier to discern. Comparing this one to the previous one with McAfee it looks like Defender turned part of itself back on automatically. The WdFilter.sys shows up now, but didn't when McAfee was installed, but this is by Microsoft's design, it's supposed to turn on and off based on 3rd party antivirus.

The latest txt file without McAfee gives you 113,121 total DPC Counts and 597.36 seconds of total latency.
The previous txt with McAfee file gives you 147,784 total DPC counts and 752.51 seconds of total latency.

Nvidia spiked up to 905 ms on the McAfee version, and only went up to 244 ms in the latest.

Lower numbers is best for both stats. McAfee was definitely having an effect. Pretty much anything else you start to disable from here will continue to decrease the numbers further. Whether it's removing components in NTLite or using reg keys to toggle things, etcetera.

I've been revisiting Google again to see if anyone discovered anything new, or I could glean something better from the posts now that we know more, and I'm still stuck... It seems to be a crapshoot, it's so unpredictable. I think until something new comes to light all we can do is hope that someone stumbles on a fix as we continue to all work on tweaking our images and using NTLite, or until Microsoft/Nvidia fix this.

as i said i had read somewhere that people were having issues from 1809, but never really experienced anything before hand. Apparently it caused issues between nvidia and ms, but ms finally admitted they were working to fix it, then amd ryzen and ms, with both working on fixed. it is possible it is something intergrated within the whole security/gaming architecture, but always willing to run test like that when needed

 

[Audionot]

In your report the Nvidia driver is great, but wdf01000 is really quite bad with massive DPC Counts. I don't know what ntsokrnl and wdf01000 really are under the hood, since these are like "catch all" processes. Antivirus software is a huge contributor to overall DPC issues though, and a large factor in other related problems, such as hard pagefaults, stuttering and being disconnected from things like voice chat or straight up being kicked out of a game mid-match, etcetera.

With defender off. will comment more on it later. on the phone...

 

[Audionot]

I was avoiding windows 11 thinking that I'd be immune from the constant system breaking updates. This DPC thing is definitely a bummer. I'm actually not having serious real world issues at the moment, so maybe this is far enough to the good for me...Time will tell. This is a brand new build, so I'll have a better feel for it in a month or two. I'm guessing there's not much more tweaking I can do at this point anyway. Very cool thread though. I'll definitely stay tuned and am happy to help with testing on my end if that's useful.


Things are better than they were. So there's that...

If they do end up addressing these issues in a future update, I'll definitely switch to 11.

 

[Clanger]

Slight Of Topic but bear with me. Has anyone compared XP High Performance and w10 Ultimate power plans side by side?
Tried importing XP-HiPo into w10 or removing all the entries in 10-Ult except those that exist in XP-HiPo?
If someone can upload XP-HiPo PP i can test it.

 

[Hellbovine]

Slight Of Topic but bear with me. Has anyone compared XP High Performance and w10 Ultimate power plans side by side?

I ended up tossing out my XP disc and I've regretted it ever since, for these kinds of reasons. I didn't think dealing with W10 would be *this* difficult, lol. I want to keep reiterating though in every thread it appears, that the W10 "Ultimate" power plan is not really a thing. I don't know why Microsoft ran the PR on it the way they did, it's pure fluff and nothing more. The *only* thing that the ultimate plan does is turn off hardisk idle, changing it from a default of 20 minutes to 0 which can be changed by the most casual computer user in less than 10 seconds from the control panel, faster than it takes to use powercfg and enable the ultimate plan. We need to stop bringing attention to ultimate entirely, because it's turning into misinformation.

 

[Clanger]

if modern windows power plans are rammed full of power saving settings if we strip them out and leave basix xp type settings and adjust their values to match xp-hipo what would be the result?