A/V stutter - R3

Hey again guys,

I've been having an intermittent stutter when watching video. I searched and there was a long article the DPC latency that seemed to explain what I was experiencing, but the last post was in 2010 and most of the people were R1 and R2 owners so I thought it was long addressed with R3.

Trying to list all the relevant hardware and drivers below, anyone has a fix?

Mine is a late-2011 R3, factory OS image + A09 BIOS, A02 VBIOS, Nvidia 295.51, Intel HD 8.15.10.2622, Intel Chipset INF 9.3.0.1019, Intel Rapid Storage Technology 10.8.0.1003, Bigfoot Networks Killer Network Manager 6.1.0.298, IDT HD Audio 6.10.0.6320


Thanks in advance,
Dave

 

did you experience this behaviour with the 290.53 drivers as well?

 

I never tried 290.53, but I was using 290.36 before and come to think of it I don't recall any issues. Just as I'm posting this I see that DPC Latency Checker has had no yellow or red bars at all for quite a while but was all over the place last night... :/ Only difference was last night the laptop was connected to a second monitor and the Nvidia GPU was dedicated to that display and today I'm on a single screen only....

 

First of all, you should check if it really is dpc latency.
Download DPC Latency Checker , start it and leave it running in the background in a scenario where you are experiencing the stutter. If there are frequent huge red spikes, it is a latency problem.

Also, this isnt something Dell can "fix". DPC Latency is caused by Drivers, which are controlled by the user.

If you want to get rid of DPC Latency, you would have to correctly clean and re install every driver for every device in your device-manager,
PHYSICAL (refer to http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...er-install-order-guide-alienware-systems.html ) AND VIRTUAL (e.g. virtual drives from "daemon tools" or ""virtual clone drive").

You could start with LAN, WLAN, Bluetooth and also every virtual interface (like OpenVPN, Hamachi etc. , i would just uninstall them for testing purposes), because networking drivers are most likely to cause this.

 

I have downloaded DPC latency checker (stated in my post above) and yes, it is a DPC issue. When I have some time I'll systematically go through each and ever driver install.

Danke für die Hilfe!

 

Oh yeah i totally forgot that (found in the textblock of the tool ): you could just disable some devices and check if it still happens. Thats much faster than re installing drivers that are potentially working fine. oops

 

Computer is presently completely idle, and this:


Pretty upsetting, really.

Edit: this was taken only 11 minutes and a reboot later:


Puzzling to say the least.

Oh yeah, in addition to the reboot, I switched from dual monitor mode (with the 580M dedicated to the external monitor) to laptop screen only with the I-GPU as the default.

Here's another screenshot back with dual monitors again 11 minutes after the previous and a fresh reboot:


I'm coming away with a Nvidia driver/VBIOS issue. Using 295.51/A02.

 

try installing the 290.53 driver and see if the problem still exists...

 

Did that, looks very promising! +rep

 

Tried 290.53 briefly, then installed 295.73 WHQL drivers. Also removed the Bigfoot Networks Killer drivers and installed generic Atheros drivers as recommended by SlickDude80.

Didn't notice any A/V stutters, but DPC latency still has some high peaks.

I *think* the insane absolute maximum value reflects some time that the computer was in hibernate mode while the program was still running. If programs and video run fluidly I'm not so inclined to care about the absolute values of the DPC latency, but it's still early and I'll continue to report my findings using these new drivers. I also received my ram upgrade, which I will do this weekend. I might re-paste the heatsinks of the CPU and GPU then while the laptop is apart.

 

glad it worked.
i had a similar problem with the 295.51 drivers and videoplayback.
after 30-45 minutes every video suddenly experienced framedrops up to the point where you were just watching a diashow.

maybe i will try the new 295.73, but since you already installed them and got no problems out of it i guess they fixed those bug.