M17x DPC Latency

Why would they do that? Who cares if it spikes coming out of sleep?

Of course you would get a spike putting it to sleep and waking it up.

 

Cause that's when i hear the pop. When i get that large spike out of sleep. It still kinda bothers me.

 

Here is watching a 1080p YouTube video. Doesn't seem to matter if the video is downloading or finished. Sea of yellow spikes with the occasional red (not shown in this one, I was too slow to catch it). When I was watching in full-screen, the video would pause every so often that I would have to ESC out and re-click on the full screen button. (I was watching the nVidia PureVideo HD video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XITHbsUUlYI just click on the 1080p) After dinner I will fire up Steam and try to get some in-game readings and post those up later.

 

installed the driver, and for the past couple of hours I have been using it for work - emails, word, visio, powerpoint, photoshop and created 3 PDF documents. Currently listening to MP3s and so far the highest spike has been 20875 .. however this is not noticeable to me when listening to audio - in other terms, no more stutter. This driver is a step in the right direction (though probably needs a couple of tweaks as the spike occur in a group of three every now and then).

 

Pops are pretty normal when coming out of sleep... it's the sound card being powered back on. All devices that can get powered off, will get powered off in sleep. This audio popping has been present no matter what computer I have, when I bring it out of sleep.

lewdvig is correct about DPC and sleep. Your DPC latency will show in microseconds the period of time that the computer was in sleep on the DPC counter. No processing while in sleep = large DPC. This is completely normal.

Anyways, DPC from sleep and audio popping from sleep are definitely not the concern with the M17x... it's the DPC that's present while the computer is fully powered on.

 

Just played a few minutes of Day of Defeat: Source, more a processor intensive game than a GPU...but, I had good frame rate for the time I was in game, I didn't notice any big audio stutters in my limited time there...however, I did at the beginning of the game as shown below. This was before I got online, just during the cinematics of the game and such. Audio/video stuttering of old and you can see the spikes. So, like illucid said, a step in the right direction.

One thing that I didn't catch... I was just looking at my checker and at some point during the game I did get a spike of 43597. I am not 100% sure when it happened, but I am going to assume that it happened at one spot where I died and fell off the map. My FPS dipped from the 130's to the 30's for the briefest of moments and the splash noise was just slightly different. Once my point of view changed, everything was back to normal.

 

What can i say .

 

Sauce, this is with the 'DPC fix' drivers? Say it isn't so!

 

I'm trying to download the ftp driver but I keep getting this message:

This self-extracting zip file is part of a multidisk zip file. Please insert the last disk of the set.

???

 

Just saw that the driver is live on the support site. Here is what the additional info has to say...

This BETA Driver has been through limited compatibility and stability testing by Dell on Dell platforms.
There may be more stable drivers, including the drivers originally shipped with your computer, available under the video section.
This is not a digitally signed driver.

Known Issues:
1) If a clean driver install is performed (e.g. remove old driver, reboot, install beta driver, reboot), you may experience some brief LCD color cycling and horizontal flickering lines during the Windows startup process on the initial boot with the beta driver. This occurs briefly and will go away after you have logged in to Windows (fix will be available soon).
2) No support for 60Hz refresh rate
3) Ejecting the optical drive will cause a spike in DPC latency (fix will be available soon).

Almost seems like they are cutting and pasting what we say here...there. LOL! One thing I am somewhat pleased about is that the hybrid switch is working for me. I am not talking about pushing the stealth mode button, just clicking on the hybrid icon and switching. That seems to be working whereas before, I would spike and lock up. I spike (74k) about 3 times as it switches over, but it switches over and calms down.

One other thing... #2 states no support for 60Hz... I have it enabled on mine, "Boost Performance"... I will check how it is with the 9400. Just checked... I can get 60Hz on both the 260m and the 9400. Not sure why Dell cannot...

Ahh... When I switch between the two, it defaults to 59Hz each time. I will check how it does after a reboot.

 

yeah its the Beta driver.

 

trickster, what you saw during gaming is what I've seen with the 4870... seems nvidia with this fixed driver are about equal with the ATIs on DPC now. I occasionally see spikes of 40-50k while simply browsing the web... spikes of 8k-20k are pretty frequent in between while idle.

Still seeking an exchange or refund at this point. I'm guessing my warranty will be up by the time they finally get this fixed.

 

Yeah. I am going to try to do a video encoding tonight or tomorrow and see if things improve there. I didn't buy this for games, I bought it for multimedia creation/editing including video editing. That is my biggie at this point. If I still cannot do a clean video, then I will have to go for an exchange.

 

I can confirm what BatBoy says here. This is not the display drivers causing this. Abuse of the eject button or the touchpad seems to be the case here.

 

I followed the instructions & made a clean install after having gone through safe mode and running driver sweeper and erasing all nvidia drivers , no dpc issues for now but my network driver wont install nor the SMU Driver, under device management i have a question mark in Nvidia Nforce Networking Controller, and when i right click & select properties under device status it says: Windows cannot start this hardware device because its configuration information (in the registry) is incomplete or damaged. (Code 19)? I'm i the only one with this issue or what Im i doing wrong?

 

I am still getting spikes but noticed a decrease in sound glitches.

 

Just installed the beta driver over my old one, red spikes are all gone in normal use and there is no more stutter while listening to music and browsing the web! Also tried out Left 4 Dead 2 and the Just Cause 2 demo and they still run silky smooth.

Like others have said though, touching the eject button and turning off the touch pad still causes audio stutter and spikes around 40k. Still though, this driver is definitely a step in the right direction!

 

From my experience, this still isn't possible. Sad, but true. Encoded a 10 minute long 720p video. Audio was off sync by about 5 seconds by the end of the finished product... used my desktop, same software, nearly same hardware (just desktop versions), perfect encoding... only difference? Intel chipset on the motherboard. Yep.

 

Screenshots of DPC checker are useless.

Do stamatisx's test and post the results. Proof is needed so that Dell can fix this.

 

ok - just a quick follow up - I had not installed the latest WLAN driver and was just using the Microsoft one. Now with the wireless disabled, I haven't had a spike over 1,704.

Some solid gaming tonight after work finishes to follow up and see how it runs then.

 

That is disappointing. What software do you use? Curious to see if we use the same stuff.

 

And btw, I have a desktop with nearly identical specs to the laptop... nVidia chipset and SLI 9600GT's...No issues encoding. I can encode while listening to mp3's and watching YouTube...

 

I managed to modify the .inf file and successfully installed the beta driver on my clevo... unfortunately my gtx260m seems to be locked at full clock rates. I tried the Powermizer Switch program and enabled powermizer, rebooted, but gpu is still locked at max clocks.

Any ideas? or should I just wait the official beta release from Nvidia?

Edit: GPU-Z 0.3.8 confirms I have ForceWare 196.86 installed.
Edit2: When i unplug the power cord and switch to battery the GPU downclocks to level 3 (from 550 to 383 MHz) and stays locked there until i plug the power back on.

 

is anyone having this weird white wave from top to bottom after windows logo at start up right before login?

 

Not that I have noticed, but I haven't specifically looked for it. I will next time I reboot.

 

kinda a hard to miss, take a look: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoliNUVE2W8

 

found the bug, i had an external monitor connected, which prevented the gpu from downclocking...

after a few minutes of testing i confirm that the DPC problem is partly solved, but not entirely. I used to get 64k spikes when the GPU downclocked, this is no longer the case. Now I'm getting 18k spikes when the GPU switches from level 1 (200 MHz) to level 4 (550 MHz).

Edit: I can hear audio stutter when these 18k spikes occur.

 

Wow, nope, never seen that one. I am not on W7 though, Vista. Wonder if the driver had an issue when it installed or had some data corruption.

 

Well I was running the checker while just doing some of my normal NBR business and had an ugly result

This is with the intel 6300 N wireless card and driver as well, not the broadcom

It is not the worst we have seen, but my system already has pretty much all the unneeded processes and services disabled and is running very slim (830mb used at idle by OS an programs). This is in Windows 7 Professional 64-bit with 4870 CF

 

Ok I've done some further testing with the beta drivers and I ALWAYS get a single 18k spike when my GPU switches from its min clock (level 1, 200 MHz) to its max clock (level 4, 550 MHz). The spike causes a slight audio stutter.

I tested the other upclock transitions (3 to 4, 2 to 4) and those are clean. All downclocks are also clean (4 to 3, 3 to 2, 2 to 1).

I would encourage other people to test with a single GPU (SLI disabled) to see if you can reproduce this with your 280m. What I've done is I keep an eye on the clock rate in GPU-Z and I open a wmv file in windows media player when I want to stress the card (it makes it throttle to the max clock rate automatically). Then close the file, let the card downclock to the desired level and fire up the video file again to test the upclock transition.

Dell-Bill, can you pass that information along to the engineers please? Thanks!

Edit: I reproduced the same tests on battery power. The 4th clock state is not available on battery power (not sure if it is the powermizer default or a setting in my power plan). The downclocks are clean (3 to 2, 2 to 1), but I'm getting a 18k spike on the 1 to 3 transition. The 2 to 3 transition is clean.

 

My boot-ups are clean.

 

Here is a screen of me just surfing on tumblr, site where people post pics. All I am doing is scrolling through firefox and clicking on the next page link. Nothing else going on at all...

 

are you hearing any audio/stutter or lock ups, can you run music in the background to confirm this.

 

Not sure what is happening there. Certainly dont see the seem behavior - in IE8 or Firefox.

Suggest checking Stamatisx's thread and running the trace. It will confirm or rule out the NV driver being the cause and may help to pinpoint what to look at on your system.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=461247

 

Only had DPC open and one Firefox window. Nothing else was going on my machine.

Yeah, figured I might have to do that. I have the software and I printed out his guide. Grr! Why can't it just work like it is supposed too?

 

how does your dpc look if you disable sli and run on a single gpu?

 

I did not see this result with IE8 and itunes running in the background with headphones and no headphones to check the speakers, I also had DPC open mostly green and with one or two yellow bars but nothing that contributed to a lock up or a audio pop or even a red bar.

 

Just tried the new beta drivers from the support site for a bit. My results are better better, audio/video stutter is far less frequent (every couple of minutes now as opposed to every couple of seconds), but it's still there when playing audio/video as well as playing games, but mostly not as prominent. DPC Latency is better as well, but I still get spikes ranging from 4k-6k as well as 16k-55k (not very often anymore, mind you) here and there (which apparently still cause the audio and video to stutter). Tried some video encoding and audio/video still gets out of synch whenever there is a spike.
Oh well. I hope the driver fix works better for everyone else.

 

i have ATIs so i can talk about the 9400m only.
i can see green and yellow spikes with the new driver.
eject button causes 62000 spikes-audio stuttering (this is an other story but just to compare with the 8000 spikes of claxdog). but for me this occurs even with the ATIs->41000 spikes but still cause a slight audio stuttering.

The green bars with the ATIs are even lower than those with the 9400m only.

 

just an update on my case

with the new bios for the r2 out, the tech has told me that she can request for a replacement r2 for me right now.

however as i am sick and tired of every single gaming laptop ive had from dell/alienware having problems so far, i asked if i could get an alienware desktop instead since im done with laptops.

ill get a smaller laptop instead for school.

anyway, she tells me that she will submit the request for me as well to see if i can get a desktop instead but if not, i will get the r2.

 

So far so good! The beta drivers have fixed stutter almost completely (still have spikes after pressing eject button but the stutters has been greatly decreased) Have yet to test gaming but here's a screen shot: running movie, 720p youtube video, playing mp3's, and switching and scrolling between tabs on firefox.

 

I am really interested to find out more about this, could you do me a favor and send me a PM with the links of the programs you use and their settings in order to repeat the process myself and see if I reproduce the same results?

 

from what I have done so far these drivers are an improvement (but not a total fix).

I still get a bunch of red (4000+ with the ocasional 16k+) but at least I have not hit 80k+ like I did before.

Gaming went better with little stuttering/audio glitches and watching videos went fine.

Well, these drivers are a step in the right direction at least.. hope they continue on this path

D.

 

can you open firefox in fullscreen and then close it immediately? does it cause red spikes?

still some fps drops? hm. like the ATIs. the rest spikes must be due to the chipset. not the driver the chipset itself. well if this doesnt work or if it doesnt absolutely work then i dont know what they could do more.

 

I tried it multiple times and have yet to receive a red spike after opening and closing quickly.

 

you mean you dont have any red spike when doing this?

it seems that in my case this is due to the mouse as i dont have this when using the touchpad. did you use mouse while doing this or the touchpad?

 

No I do not have any red spike, and yes I am using a mouse.

 

Very good improvement for me. Still get the occasional 2 to 4k spike, but that's it. No sound issues, game frame rates very smooth. Never had slowdowns in games like others are reporting, pre-driver upgrade, nor now.

Will run the tests when I have a chance to see what is still causing the small spikes.

Also don't have spikes when maxing Firefox and closing.

Don't have any red spikes when playing 1080p flash movies (Flash 10.1).

 

smooth as butter for me with the new beta driver too.

by the way, I did NOT uninstall the Nvidia chipset.

 

Did you guy install the physx driver. I didnt see it on the site.