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Latencymon and Graphics cards -- best for audio

JohnG

Senior Member
Hi there,

Latencymon keeps telling me that I'm getting the biggest interrupts from my external graphics cards. Nvidia seems to be a real issue in some cases, though updating to the latest drivers helps. DirectX Graphics Kernel also seems to be an issue, as is NT Kernel & System, but not much to do about the latter, I assume.

First off, is this "real" or something that Latencymon just kicks out? Second, if it is real, what is the lowest interrupting card for graphics for what we do?

Thanks,

John
 
I have a GTX 1070 in one of my systems, a 1060 on my laptop and I have run into latency issues with both of them. Disabling the card fixed the issue for me in both cases.

nVidia's Pascal cards seem particularly vulnerable, but I don't think it's a hardware issue. LatencyMon shows this one file called nvlddmkm.sys (NVIDIA Windows Kernel Mode Driver) as the main culprit. This file takes too long to execute and presumably messes with the audio buffers.

I don't encounter this issue consistently—it's seemingly random and that makes it quite frustrating. Some driver versions seem to exacerbate this issue while other versions seem to reduce it, but I've yet to find a common and consistent solution.
 
I took my external card out of my strings computer completely, which resulted in a huge improvement. On that computer, I'm using the onboard graphics port from the motherboard.

Have two PCs that don't have any onboard graphics, however, so I'm on the hunt for a non-Nvidia card.
 
You could look into the previous generation of AMD cards, the RX 500 series of cards. Be warned though, with all the cryptomining madness, these guys may be either out of stock, or hiked to ridiculous prices.
 
I’ve just moved from Mac to PC and have been getting this issue too. I was using an Nvidia GTX960 in my Mac and so just dumped it in my pc build.

Surely there must be some sort of solution to this instead of having to buy another card? I don’t want to have to spend more money!!
 
Not yet no. It’s been one of those things where I spent some time trying to look into it, then some work came in and I never got round to fixing it!!

Latency monitor was looking like this

D0E33996-A1B0-47E6-9579-BEF50866C776.jpeg

Then Jason (Tack) suggested I roll back to another driver to see if it helped. It did a little...

4223C4E9-CFD2-4099-AEAB-D83C4AEE667E.jpeg

But then I went and reinstalled the most up to date driver and it was the same as the older driver I tried.

There’s a few videos on the YouTube about it too...



But yes, next step is to disable the GTX and run off the internal graphics to see what difference it makes.
 
We don't really need graphics cards for the work we do if the CPU has an integrated GPU...

OTOH, if you're working with both audio and graphics (3D rendering and whatnot), then yeah, you'd need one. But if you're doing audio only, you don't need it really. I drive two 24" monitors from the iGPU of my i7-6700K without any hitch or DPC spiking.
 
I sadly can’t run my setup from the iGPU. I need HDMI 2 to run my main screen at 4K 60hz! The display port runs my second 1440p screen.

And ye know, playing games n stuff :)
 
I'd have a dedicated machine for games, so that the DAW machine is "pure".

In your situation I'd run the 4K display over DP and run the 1440p display over HDMI. Get a converter if the monitor doesn't have HDMI input (what kind of monitor apart from Apple's doesn't have a HDMI input these days?).
 
Thanks. I don’t really play many games to be honest. Just every now and again - honest! Not enough to justify building a whole machine for it anyway (I’ve two kids under 6!).

Thanks for display setup recommendation. Annoyingly my 4K display is actually a tv and therefore doesn’t have a DP. The 1440p is a Dell so it has everything :)

If the mobo supported HDMI 2 I’d be sorted!
 
Get this:

https://www.amazon.com/Club3D-Displayport-1-2-HDMI-CAC-1070/dp/B017BQ8I54 (LINK)

Mobo DP to this to TV. Mobo HDMI to Dell.


Pretty much all the digital ports (DVI, HDMI, DP) are interchangeable with the right adapter.
 
And sorry for hijacking your thread John!

[sniff, whimper, weep....]

I still need a solution. The two PCs using onboard graphics port perform far better on Latencymon than those with graphics cards. Need something non-Nvidia. Is Intel any better? Do they even make graphics cards?
 
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My DPC latency is consistently solid. Although previously I had run 388.13, it's been so far well behaved even with the latest driver (installed this weekend to play Far Cry 5 :)).

One thing I do which may or may not matter: I don't install any of the extraneous stuff (3D vision drivers, HD audio driver, GeForce Experience). I also disable the NVIDIA telemetry service (although I wouldn't expect that to affect DPC latency).
 
I may have treated myself to Farcry 5 too. Purely for research purposes of course. Wanted to see what my new machine could do ;)
 
My DPC latency is consistently solid. Although previously I had run 388.13, it's been so far well behaved even with the latest driver (installed this weekend to play Far Cry 5 :)).

One thing I do which may or may not matter: I don't install any of the extraneous stuff (3D vision drivers, HD audio driver, GeForce Experience). I also disable the NVIDIA telemetry service (although I wouldn't expect that to affect DPC latency).

I'll give that a go. I'm a hobbyist so my audio PC is also my gaming PC, photo PC and everything-else PC. I'm running a GTX 970 and latency monitor shows my GPU to be running up some latency. It was much worse when I had one of the free anti virus programs running (Avast or AVG). Swapped to NOD32 and things are much improved other than my GPU.
 
My PC is also a general use system, for doing All The Things. It's certainly easier to optimize when you have a system dedicated to a specific task.

Personally I'd just use Defender. (Actually personally I don't use any antivirus at all, but if I was making recommendations for people who aren't already pathologically paranoid about computer hygiene, it'd be to stick with Defender.)
 
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