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

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Didnt make a bit of bloody difference, 334ps us ms or whatever its called.
Oh, mine makes it into the thousands (>3000) if I have the power mode set to normal.
Maximum Performance globally gets me down to the hundreds, but even that stills seems high.
How has nvidia not fixed this if it's been an issue for years?! smh
 
What driver is being used? I might have to test mine again since 22H2.
I'm using nvidia's latest, 517.48, that came out on September 27th.
It was the same for me on the last two driver versions too, and was the same on 21H2 and 22H2.
I literally did a fresh install of Win11 22H2 rather than upgrading to try and eliminate this issue, but nope, it persists.
Within minutes of starting LatencyMon monitoring, every time, easily repeatable.

nvlddmkm.sys issue (2).jpg
 
Chunky1311, I'm glad that helped bring it down to reasonable levels at least, that's good. I had already tried the power management mode setting as well though, before I contacted Nvidia, and no change for me unfortunately. I would still say anything above 250 is a problem though, so anyone that's in the hundreds is still experiencing issues, even if they might not realize it.

I think this is a bug in their driver, and it's just not being elevated to the developers. I bet if I spent the hours just downloading the recent most 50 drivers, and I just install them one by one, eventually if I go back far enough the problem will go away, proving it's a driver issue. But that doesn't really solve the problem because then you lose out on just as many bugfixes and other performance improvements by using older drivers that I doubt it will make up for it.

It seems like we're going to be stuck with this issue, until one of the tech websites and/or a popular streamer brings up the issue and gets the attention of Nvidia, because clearly the customer service route will never get us there. I saw this happen time and time again in Blizzard games too, where many of us experience some bug or performance problem, and it's not until some famous streamer with inside connections brings light to the problem that it gets patched.
 
On the note of Nvidia being a pain to work with, I found it highly validating that apparently EVGA has ceased partnership with Nvidia and refuses to work with them at all now, even though graphics cards made up 80% of EVGA's revenue stream, because Nvidia is too hard to work with. Here's an article on that (link).

Also for anyone curious, I actually contacted some 20 different tech websites and reported this entire situation to them, about the DPC issues, asking them to do 1 of 2 things:

1) Suggestion to include DPC benchmarks in all future hardware/driver reviews on their sites.

2) Suggestion to write an article about the Nvidia driver DPC issues.

Only 1 place replied to me, so it doesn't seem like any tech places care about this either, which is frankly ignorant and ridiculous. DPC should have always been included in benchmarking throughout the years, it's arguably more important than framerates.

And finally, my Nvidia support ticket has had 5 different agents reply to me now, all with BS troubleshooting, and I replied back again, re-explaining everything and asking for specific non-vague answers to a few questions, like "What is nvlddmkm.sys responsible for?" and so forth, and it's still awaiting a response since September 15th...
 
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For all having issues; was the program used right after startup or waited 5 minutes or so after and made.sure nothing ran in the mean time(even screensaver).

just wanting to check on a few things.
 
Hi all, I'm one of those lurkers you hear so much about but I just had to make an account since this is the only place were there is an actual conversation happening surrounding the "nvlddmkm.sys problem".

I too have the dreaded audio popping and crackling problem and just like Hellbovine I've waded through every forum's suggestions (about 12/14 hours over 4 days) on how to fix things, from the helpful first responses of: "Just update your bios bro, lol" to the more in depth but nothing seems to work, Including a full format and reinstall of windows 10. This is with a GTX 3080 TI, a disabled Realtek onboard Soundcard and using a SoundblasterX G6.

Latencymon.png

Oh and also I'm using an Intel processor (i9 10900K), apparently there's a bit of a misconception on the internet that pretty much only AMD processors + Nvidia Graphics card-combos are affected.

I just wanted to say that I'm pretty sure there's a bunch of people actively watching this thread and I'd like to show my appreciation of the actual work you guys (Hellbovine specifically) have already been doing, it makes me feel like I'm not going insane and that I'm not the only one in the world with this (unsolvable) problem.

During all this a thought popped into my head: What if the vast majority of Nvidia card users suffer from this problem to varying degrees? What if most people simply don't notice because the problem isn't too severe for them? Because I'm now conditioned to listen for the pops and crackles I start to notice it everywhere, especially on places such as YouTube (where I rewind the video thinking "Was that me? or the video?" and most of the time It's the YouTuber having the exact same pop or crackle baked into their video. I know it's not conclusive evidence and pops can happen for a variety of (audio based) reasons but it's just too suspicious, especially since I also work with video and audio and during my own recordings if there's a DPC related pop or crackle it will get recorded.

Anyway, I'm currently waiting for news on the newest generation of AMD GFX cards and if the prices aren't too insane I'm most likely going to buy one, if they are insane though I'm going to purchase a 6950 XT (Which would be a side-grade for me but whatever) Once I do, I will inform you guys if it made any difference since there's a lot of talk especially on Reddit about AMD GFX users not having this problem.

Thanks again guys.
 
For all having issues; was the program used right after startup or waited 5 minutes or so after and made.sure nothing ran in the mean time(even screensaver).

just wanting to check on a few things.
I've tried a variety of combinations.
Running LatMon right after a reboot, hours into PC use, hours into PC idle, and days into PC use.
None show any differences for me, I consistently get DPC latency in the thousands from nvlddmkm.sys.
It does manifest in the form of audio pops/stutters, as well as the entire PC slowing down at times, most obvious by the mouse lagging and jumping centimetres across the screen at a time rather than smooth movement.
I might try safe mode and see if the issues persists.

Tested over 5 minutes no issues with Nvidia driver 516.94(installed with NVCleaninstall with msi and other tweaks added)
I've never used NVCleaninstall, I can try that if you think it might help!
Msi, as in, the type of interrupts? I already have everything I can set to use msi interrupts.
What other tweaks did you add?
 
I'll play devil's advocate -- what happens when you de-prioritize the GPU? The audio driver doesn't want as much CPU compared to the NVIDIA driver, which lowers its process priority. Since Window isn't a "fair share" process scheduler the NVIDIA driver gets more utilization at the expense of the audio driver getting equally spaced clock ticks.

Does DPC latency drop when the GPU is set to the weakest performance profile (power mode, priority, etc.)?

Why do users with the fastest CPU & GPU models have the most problems, when their HW is more than enough to handle the workload?
 
Default value(right after install) or the highest profile its the same, 334, i5 9400f gt710, windows idling, just La-Mon running.
I got several things using the same irq as the gpu.
GPU not running as its rated speed but throttled like cpu cores?
 
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Tested over 5 minutes no issues with Nvidia driver 516.94(installed with NVCleaninstall with msi and other tweaks added)
What values did you get though? If you managed to get it under 100, then I'd say one of your tweaks or something is the key to solving this.

To answer your question from earlier about when to run LatencyMon, I always put my PC into a benchmarking state before I try to test things, and always the same way for each test too. So like one method is to run the command rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks and then reboot after it's done, then let the PC idle for 10 minutes and then begin benchmarking. You could also theoretically run tests after that command finishes without rebooting, but I don't like to do that because W10/W11 increases it's memory usage afterwards since it doesn't easily release the memory used by all those background tasks/programs (hence all the other posts on the forum about standby list cleaners, etc), and I want a consistant baseline so I choose to reboot.

I also never use safe boot for benchmarking, even though you'll see it promoted in some places, I think it's a bad idea because too many services and such are disabled. It's not a normal test environment and so you are less likely to see real world results. I also only do benchmarking on the high performance power plan, because the idle states, core parking, and all the other power saving stuff plays a huge role.
 
Im fiddling with another ltsc 17763.3165 build, will do a reinstall of it, barebone the services and tweaks to my usual specification, my standard working environment and report back. Memory usage? use that ram cleaner(v2) i posted about in LTSC Barebone Services thread.
 
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I also only do benchmarking on the high performance power plan
If you install the custom power plans from Bitsum and QuickCPU then use MBK1969's Power Settings Explorer its easy to see which values should be increased or decreased but on all plans some entries values are the same so you dont know whether to increase or decrease, you'll have to test. I was wondering what the results would be if you deleted those entries,,,,
 
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I've tried a variety of combinations.
Running LatMon right after a reboot, hours into PC use, hours into PC idle, and days into PC use.
None show any differences for me, I consistently get DPC latency in the thousands from nvlddmkm.sys.
It does manifest in the form of audio pops/stutters, as well as the entire PC slowing down at times, most obvious by the mouse lagging and jumping centimetres across the screen at a time rather than smooth movement.
I might try safe mode and see if the issues persists.


I've never used NVCleaninstall, I can try that if you think it might help!
Msi, as in, the type of interrupts? I already have everything I can set to use msi interrupts.
What other tweaks did you add?
Take a look at NVCleaninstall online with videos first before trying, they explain things better than having to type an extremely long post. Levels after 5 minutes of testing was low (39-130s) for the top one that I remembered but even then my system goes from the PC to the demon audio reciever to my tv.

On NTLITE all I have used was the privacy template first(tweaked that one for my use) then the gaming template (tweaked once again for my own computer after making sure everything was fine) after that I remove some other things that I don't have a need for. It's pretty much the same thing after every big update because why break what's working for me you know.

Side note system
AMD 8350 (overclocked to 4.7)
Gskill 2133(Overclocked to 2400 and super tight without failing)
Asus Sabertooth 990fx r2 motherboard
Samsung 940 SSD
1000 watt power supply (for future proofing my old system)
1070 Nvidia card(Want to get a 3060 or 70 for HDMI 2.1)
Denon audio with LG C7 tv

System used for very light gaming and mostly movies/tv shows.
 
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Im only using a gpu card to take some of the load off single channel ram and the heat load off the cpu, i could well go back to an igpu.
 
Ok, I'm back.

I've been going through the exact same methods I've already used before, again.

and...

I think I might have fixed the problem, at least for now.

What I've done is extremely basic and maybe I just got lucky, because I've already done this before and it didn't work:

Create an installer using NVcleanstall:

- V516.94 (Thanks Necrosaro)
- Nothing but the drivers.
- MSI on (obviously). Priority: high. Policy: All close processors.
- Disable HDCP.

Safemode reboot. Pull out Cat Cable.

Run Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) in safe mode.
Remove absolutely everything + Restart.

Run the custom Nvcleanstall Nvidia installer.

Turn off PC. Plug in Cat cable.

Turn on. Run Latencymon passive. No issues.

Run Latencymon while having a game open on one monitor, a YouTube Video on the second monitor and furiously start refreshing tabs.
(Refreshing tabs seemed to cause a lot of popping when a video was playing previously)

Result:
Latencymonfixquestionmark.png

The Nvidia drivers don't even show up as a major contributor anymore.

Now maybe I've spoken too soon (knock on wood) but even if the problem is gone I might still purchase an AMD card in the future, I'm curious to see if it's really better out of the box, as already discussed, DPC should be used when benchmarking by tech sites and if AMD is simply "cleaner" than Nvidia that should matter. What good is a slightly faster GPU when it creates other (devastating) problems from the get-go?
 
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