NVIDIA Working On GeForce 10 DPC Latency & Stuttering Issue

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According to this GeForce.com forum thread, NVIDIA is aware of the GeForce 10 DPC latency and stuttering problems and will be addressed in an upcoming driver.

Thank you. No need to submit further survey feedbacks on this issue. We believe we understand the root cause and will provide a fix through a future driver. At this time I do not have an ETA but as soon as I have further information, I will share with everyone.
 
What is this DPC thing, and why should I care?

I might be wrong on this, so if someone else knows better feel free to correct me, but I think it's something like this:

Remember when the switch from Windows XP to Windows Vista happened and audio suddenly had a HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) introduced? So all that cool shit like EAX audio was effectively rendered useless since the audio hardware was no longer "directly accessible" to applications.

DPC (Deferred Procedure Calls) are part of that HAL and make it possible for the system to more gracefully deal with shit like too many stacked calls from software to things like drivers for audio. If you have ever been listening to some MP3s on your Windows V/7/8/10 machine with a local music player and start doing a bunch of intensive stuff on your machine and notice your audio stutter out for a moment, that's a form of DPC Latency in effect.
 
look up a appication called LatencyMon it will show bar graphs of latency. If latency gets bad you could have stuttering, and sound poping/distortion.

there are two app, LatencyMon (use for Win8/win10) and the older DCP latency checker (used for older OS ).
 
I read a bunch of that thread, and it made my head hurt.

People throwing fits of rage and RMA:ing their cards because something that requires a driver change isn't instantly fixed.

It's amazing to me how many people don't seem to understand that it takes time to push software fixes out the door, even when you have folks in panic mode working long hours after an issue like this appears.
 


It does, thank you.

I guess I've been lucky and never run into this problem before (at least not since the 90's when I vaguely recall scrolling web browser windows in Win 95 making my mp3's playing in Winplay3 stutter, but that's been a while...)

I've got a Gigabyte Gaming G1 1080 and a matching water block coming in the next few days. Hopefully this will be fixed soon.
 
Can't say I've noticed any issues on my setup, although it doesn't mean they aren't there.
 
Can't say I've noticed any issues on my setup, although it doesn't mean they aren't there.

Yeah I can test with the app mentioned above, and there's no doubt that I have the issue. I haven't encountered any symptoms that would have led me to believe something was wrong, however.

I read some threads on other forums where people in my boat (have issue, don't understand it, don't have symptoms) were raging and returning cards. Seems odd to me.. It seems to me that some of these idiots simply have never worked, or had any real responsibility. Expecting an instafix, and expecting a company like Nvidia to throw all their cards on the table and explain their suspect root cause the second that they've identified it is laughable.
 
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look up a appication called LatencyMon it will show bar graphs of latency. If latency gets bad you could have stuttering, and sound poping/distortion.

there are two app, LatencyMon (use for Win8/win10) and the older DCP latency checker (used for older OS ).

So this is why I can't play Doom using Vulkan on my 1070. Even though I get a solid 60 fps (vsync), I see a lot of stuttering and audio issues. I never would have thought the two would be related.
 
What is this DPC thing, and why should I care?

Classic OS design. It holds a critical resource which causes latency in other threads / processes. One that many people notice right away is stuttering audio, or momentary mouse pointer freeze. But you might not immediately notice a slight delay in hdd/ssd access or network packet affecting your online game latency. There is a need to balance throughput vs latency.
 
Man, there are clearly some people on that Geforce.com thread that must have some severe, crippling reading comprehension problems. Buying and returning multiple cards of the same brand expecting a DPC fix.. Somehow determining a particular brand of card is at fault..

I like how people expect the speed of the fix to be proportional to the amount of money they spent, or that bumping a support thread will make a fix come sooner, despite the fact that they've already identified the cause and are working on the fix. The NEVER AGAIN posts are my favorite. They mean never again, until AMD has some bug they don't like and there is nowhere else to go.
 
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Switching from rock solid kepler Titan to skittish Titan X was a painful experience, and I actually bought and sold a 2nd TiX to figure out if the card had a hardware issue (a lot of maxwell driver crashes early on). Which is why I am sitting tight with my Titan X until Pascal has been out for a while. (Though buying a 2nd card for testing DPC latency is truly stupid.)
 
Man, there are clearly some people on that Geforce.com thread that must have some severe, crippling reading comprehension problems. Buying and returning multiple cards of the same brand expecting a DPC fix.. Somehow determining a particular brand of card is at fault..

I like how people expect the speed of the fix to be proportional to the amount of money they spent, or that bumping a support thread will make a fix come sooner, despite the fact that they've already identified the cause and are working on the fix. The NEVER AGAIN posts are my favorite. They mean never again, until AMD has some bug they don't like and there is nowhere else to go.

If they return them to Amazon you will eventually find them for cheap in the Warehouse Deals section. Their aggravation and pain is your gain! There is always a silver lining!
 
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Does anyone know if this issue with the pascal boards also impacts other platforms (most notably Linux)? Or is this a Windows only issue?
 
I have this issue in Dying Light, tons of audio cut out that then starts playing at a high rate of speed a minute or two after the audio should have already started.
 
DPC latency issues can cause big problems for people who are trying to record. So, a musician tracking a bass guitar. Or a gamer trying to stream video. Or a podcaster. Etc. If stuff gets really bad, it can actually cause programs and games to hang/lag/stutter, as the system plays catch up due to the DPC issues.
 
So people are experiencing audio stutter?

Audio is one of the most obvious and common issues related to DPC latency, but it also affects things like draw calls and so can cause stutter in video or a game's rendering frame-times, for instance.
 
Can't say I've noticed any issues on my setup, although it doesn't mean they aren't there.

We do DPC latency testing in our motherboard reviews. Even on motherboards that have shown poor DPC latency, I've never noticed any problems playing games, watching video, or listening to audio on those systems. Sometimes the DPC latency results are appalling, and still, I've yet to notice any actual problems with DPC latency that manifested in any meaningful way. Again, this isn't to say that it can't, or that the testing isn't valid. I think it's safe to say that poor DPC test results do not necessarily indicate that you will definitely have issues with playback of audio / video content or playing games. I have heard of people having video / audio stuttering and drop outs that have occurred which did show up in DPC latency testing. Although I've responded to people on the forums here concerning that, and they have found resolution I haven't seen it first hand myself. In all the cases I can recall, the issues were always driver or firmware related. To me it seems as though DPC latency measurements do not necessarily indicate definitively that you will have issues, but in cases where you do have stuttering or drop out issues, DPC latency will aid you in exposing the cause of that problem.

This has been my experience anyway.
 
We do DPC latency testing in our motherboard reviews. Even on motherboards that have shown poor DPC latency, I've never noticed any problems playing games, watching video, or listening to audio on those systems. Sometimes the DPC latency results are appalling, and still, I've yet to notice any actual problems with DPC latency that manifested in any meaningful way. Again, this isn't to say that it can't, or that the testing isn't valid. I think it's safe to say that poor DPC test results do not necessarily indicate that you will definitely have issues with playback of audio / video content or playing games. I have heard of people having video / audio stuttering and drop outs that have occurred which did show up in DPC latency testing. Although I've responded to people on the forums here concerning that, and they have found resolution I haven't seen it first hand myself. In all the cases I can recall, the issues were always driver or firmware related. To me it seems as though DPC latency measurements do not necessarily indicate definitively that you will have issues, but in cases where you do have stuttering or drop out issues, DPC latency will aid you in exposing the cause of that problem.

This has been my experience anyway.


Yeah, so it appears in this particular case, all users of 10x0 cards that have measured them have shown abnormally high DPC values, but not all users suffer the symptoms of stutter, etc from it.

I wonder if it is some sort of interaction effect between different pieces of hardware.
 
I wonder if it is some sort of interaction effect between different pieces of hardware.

Yeah I think it takes two drivers vying for the same resource to cause the latency to be exposed. Who knows what the point of contention is, some kernel mutex, etc. So it's possible to change audio driver and somehow sidestep the issue, which is all an end-user actually cares about generally.

I actually noticed YT videos were hiccuping when I changed from Titan to Titan X, but games were fine, so I said whatever and rolled with it.
 
No clue if it makes any difference, but I'm using the HDMI-out to an amp for my audio (PCM 7.1)
 
I read a bunch of that thread, and it made my head hurt.

People throwing fits of rage and RMA:ing their cards because something that requires a driver change isn't instantly fixed.

It's amazing to me how many people don't seem to understand that it takes time to push software fixes out the door, even when you have folks in panic mode working long hours after an issue like this appears.

While I agree with you, AMD did a pretty good job fixing the PCI-E "issue".
 
I read a bunch of that thread, and it made my head hurt.

People throwing fits of rage and RMA:ing their cards because something that requires a driver change isn't instantly fixed.

It's amazing to me how many people don't seem to understand that it takes time to push software fixes out the door, even when you have folks in panic mode working long hours after an issue like this appears.
happens everywhere, seen it here too. I would assume its from younger people that don't remember "the good old days" and like you said expect intafixes.
 
While I agree with you, AMD did a pretty good job fixing the PCI-E "issue".

Agreed.

But I think they were dealing with a different animal. They had some internal driver "settings" to tweak, whereas Nvidia is dealing with some undefined interaction problem with this one, which is inherently going to take longer to resolve.

Based on the Nvidia guys post, they were only able to replicate the issue last Friday, so it is by no means unreasonable that they don't have a fix yet, only a week later.
 
This is after playing BBC2. Apparently having some problems. ?
latency2.jpg
 
Yikes. DisplayPort VR headset incompatibilities(still broken), drivers that break boost in VR (still broken), non existent availability leading to rampant price gouging (still ongoing), paper launching the 1060 and now this. Put them all together and you can build a strong case that nvidia were simply not ready and just rushed things to market.

Consequences are already emerging; Wells Fargo downgraded the company to underperform earlier today.
 
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We do DPC latency testing in our motherboard reviews. Even on motherboards that have shown poor DPC latency, I've never noticed any problems playing games, watching video, or listening to audio on those systems. Sometimes the DPC latency results are appalling, and still, I've yet to notice any actual problems with DPC latency that manifested in any meaningful way. Again, this isn't to say that it can't, or that the testing isn't valid. I think it's safe to say that poor DPC test results do not necessarily indicate that you will definitely have issues with playback of audio / video content or playing games. I have heard of people having video / audio stuttering and drop outs that have occurred which did show up in DPC latency testing. Although I've responded to people on the forums here concerning that, and they have found resolution I haven't seen it first hand myself. In all the cases I can recall, the issues were always driver or firmware related. To me it seems as though DPC latency measurements do not necessarily indicate definitively that you will have issues, but in cases where you do have stuttering or drop out issues, DPC latency will aid you in exposing the cause of that problem.

This has been my experience anyway.
I can record the issue if you would like to see it.
 
So, I got my Gigabyte 1080 G1 today.

Nifty little card. Haven't really pushed it yet, but I seem to get at least 2160Mhz with it on the stock cooler without playing with voltages. Should be great when I get it in my water loop.

Anyway, it looks good through a few passes in Unigine Heaven, and i played a couple of hours of Civ 5 without any stuttering or sound problems.

I ran the LatencyMon app while running a Unigine Heaven pass though, and it does indeed confirm that there are latency problems. For whatever reason, these latency problems are not resulting in bad symptoms on my machine, like they reportedly are for some others.

28338379095_a4c9e5401e_o.png
 
I read a bunch of that thread, and it made my head hurt.

People throwing fits of rage and RMA:ing their cards because something that requires a driver change isn't instantly fixed.

It's amazing to me how many people don't seem to understand that it takes time to push software fixes out the door, even when you have folks in panic mode working long hours after an issue like this appears.

Because nvidia drivers are perfect and amd drivers suck therefore must be gpu hardware /logic.
 
Is this the sort of thing that can be fixed with software or is it an actual engineering problem?
 
If I change my power plan to high performance like latencymon basically suggests then all the spikes go away. Of course I dont want my cpu running full speed and voltage so I wont be doing that. Plus if I was not checking with latencymon then I would never know about the spikes anyway.
 
So, I got my Gigabyte 1080 G1 today.

Nifty little card. Haven't really pushed it yet, but I seem to get at least 2160Mhz with it on the stock cooler without playing with voltages. Should be great when I get it in my water loop.

Anyway, it looks good through a few passes in Unigine Heaven, and i played a couple of hours of Civ 5 without any stuttering or sound problems.

I ran the LatencyMon app while running a Unigine Heaven pass though, and it does indeed confirm that there are latency problems. For whatever reason, these latency problems are not resulting in bad symptoms on my machine, like they reportedly are for some others.

You need to be careful with those DPC latency tools though. Not long after I first built my previous i7920/x58/6970 system I was getting audio lag in Skyrim, After looking at a monitoring tool my latency was Sky high. I set about trying every fix I could find online, nothing I did would bring the latency down.

Eventually, frustrated, I decided to just put up with it for now and try and fix it later. All I really wanted to do was play some Skyrim.

Booted back into the game and the problem was gone. One of the many fixes I'd tried had solved the problem with the game (Strongly suspect it was flashing the BIOS to an earlier version). The DPC latency checker still claimed I had a problem but it wasn't noticeable in every day use.

I'm not even going to bother testing this new Skylake build.

So don't worry about it unless it actualy causes you a problem
 
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