m15x Extremly high latency. Which driver is to blame?

There is a very definitive way to check the state of the drivers on your system and how long they take to process a request from the windows kernel and that is with a tiny free app called "DPC Latency Checker". This simple tool meaures the latency of any Deferred Procedure calles and graphs them out for you. If any kernel-mode device driver is implemented improperly it will show up as a spike on the graph.

I have now tested both my m15x and my desktop pc and was alarmed by the results. While my desktop pc hovered nicely around 200 or so my m15x averaged out on around 12000. This explains wery clearly why I have had some stuttering problems with certain video content. I have tried disabeling all the hardware I could and updated the drivers of the ones I couldn't but I am unable to find the source of the problem.

Now I urge other users to test their system so we may determine if there is an issue with my setup or if there is a larger problem with the m15x and if so we should work toghether to solve it and unleash much more power from this rig. If the average latency amongst other users matches mine then this would indicate we have some serious issues hindering us from using the full potential of the system.

Now go grab the tiny 310 KB download and test your system as well. No install required.

http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

PS. This will work on any windows system so you can go and find other low performers in your collection of systems.

 

sounds kewls fr33m4n, but honestly i am lost...
is there a site that gives a full and laymans terms explanation of the process(es) you are trying to comapre?
i get the gist of what you are seeking, but since i am not all that savy on stuff, it escapes what it is or does really...

 

I tried looking for a really basic explanation of it but since I couldn't find one I'll try to make one myself.

Basically, this app measures how long the drivers take to respond to a request sent to it by the operating system. Or, to put it another way. It measures how much time it takes for your system to communicate with the hardware and execute what you want it to do. Then, only after the drivers have converted your request to something the hardware can understand does what you want start to execute. Obviously the faster this "conversion" happens, the faster your system will respond. But even on a system as slow as mine the human reaction time is still so slow that it typically won't be noticeable. Only if you do something where every second or frame counts will you start noticing a delay because the system is incapable of processing the information fast enough.

If it still doesn't make sense let me know and I'll try to explain a bit more.

What you should do to check if there are any problems on your system is simply to download the tiny free app in the link above and run it. It requires no installation and will immediately once you run it start measuring your system. If all the bars are green then you have no problems. If some or all of your bars are red then you have something on your system misbehaving and you'll need to try and isolate the issue so that you may fix it.

If you post your results I'll try and walk you trough the troubleshooting process.

 

i can not run the app from the network i am on...but the explanation was great...
makes more sense now...
but how is one able to derive where the issues are? does the pgm give you a hint as to the trouble areas?

 

you have to go to device manager and diasable and enable each one to try and find the driver that is causing the problem. my guess is the synaptics driver. the one where you can try to type apple and it comes out as aple. when i was playing a fighting game on the m15x i really noticed the keyboard lag.

 

oh - so your betting the larger number is due in large part to the lag issue of the keyboard....
makes sense...
i will see if i can get the pgm to work when i get back to the states...
till then it will have to be a mystery to me...

 

Nope. I wish it was that easy. As you can't disable it in the device manager I removed the whole driver and it made no difference.

I also tried removing the OSD utility cause I suspected it, and even though I saw a marginal decrease it is not to blame either.

Any other owner care to post their results. It would be great to confirm whether this issue is affecting me only or if it's a more widespread issue.

 

Will do. I'll try this out after lunch.

 

Double post. I'm getting just about the same latency as you are at around 11500-12500.

 

Yeah. I was afraid this wasn't me only. I'd still like to see a few more people chime in on this whole thing before I draw any definitive conclusions but there is definitely a big performance bottleneck between us and the hadware.

 

I noticed that a lot of the drivers are out of date. I made a screenshot of a list of drivers that were out of date and will try to see if I can fix the latency by updating them.

 

I'm getting the same high results as OP. I did a complete re-install of Vista Ultimate and without installing any drivers I ran the latency check. Had the same results with no drivers installed.

 

Maybe the high latency is normal for a notebook. Anybody try this on a different laptop yet? Can't really compare to a desktop.

 

Is it possible it could be because of the 667 Mhz RAM limit... I know Hdd speeds will differ from each machine but the motherboard speed remains the same using Santa-Rosa doesn't it?

Just my 2p...

OB

 

hey guys i just ran the app and so far the highest ping i get was 1370 and will go as low as 350, just my 2 cents from my machine

 

mine are usually hovering around 1000 or so, with a low of 685 and a high of 1250.

 

big difference from the over 10k the OP was getting...

could build differences have anything to do with the number differences?
i.e. RAM, cpu, gpu....just a thought....

 

Nope this shouldn't be related. Since the app only measures the time it takes for the software to communicate with the hardware I can get low values on a top of the line system and I can get low values on a 10 year old system. The speed of the system won't matter.

Of course there is one more thing that we should take into account here and that is the fact that the driver doesn't communicate directly with the hardware in all instances. Most of the time the request will travel from the driver to the firmware, in this case the BIOS, before it hits the hardware. If the BIOS is the problem then any driver we try won't help much. And I'm actually not that confident about the alienware BIOS. I know GigaByte had a huge problem with their P45 mobos which was eventually fixed through a BIOS update

But this is just speculation of course. What we should do is compare the results from an XP setup to a Vista setup, both with and without drivers installed. If the results still are the same then we need to hammer alienware for a BIOS update because a latency of 12000µs is just ridiculous. GigaByte managed to get their latency down to just 7µs after the update. We would actually notice an improvement if alienware did this.

When I think about it though there is one major piece of evidence that speaks for a bad BIOS being the cause. If there were just one driver acting up then we would have spikes of red with intermittent low value green in the app. But I personally get solid red across the board meaning that all requests sent by the drivers suffer the same latency, and why is that happening? Because they all have to go through the same bottleneck. The BIOS.


Then again there is this:

If we can track why bngreenchev gets so much nicer values there might be a different solution.

I hope to get some more test data, and if people can post their bios version as well that would be awesome. I'm personally on the X34.

 

was there not a more recent version?

 

nope. X34 is the newest BIOS version. and it includes audio popping, so some (including me) have steered clear.

 

well darn - then i am lost....what (if it existed) was the number 41 i thought was floating around then?

 

that's v41 for the touch control buttons

 

lol
ok - at least i am not going totally into memory loss yet....

 

So you're saying that you have the X32 BIOS? And I have the X34 BIOS. Could it be that simple? I'd love to see some more X32 vs X34 results to confirm this link.

 

hey freeman, what kind of scores are you getting in 3dmark06 even with the high latency?? Compare these with ryujin and whizzo's 3dscores.

 

yeah i've got x32. 3dmark06 is just over 10k on a good day. but i don't think that the BIOS will cause the RAM response time difference.

 

RAM response? I'm not quite following you.

 

video RAM??

 

well, latency then.

 

I've just had a small breakthrough. I updated my GPU drivers from 177.79 to 177.92 and I no longer have a red across the board result from the DPC Latency Checker. I can now get values all the way down to 1000us, but I still spike at over 12000us. I am calling this a small breakthrough because a normal system should hover around 50us. 1000us is still way too high.

 

I tried installing these GPU drivers yesterday and I was only down 1000us less than what I had before. The us now hovers around 11000us as opposed to 12500. I know this is a bit extreme but I was planning to do it anyway. Would you like me to check the latency without any major driver installed? I'm doing a clean installation of XP (I was originally using my m15x to try and replicate and fix certain issues to see which works and which doesn't before I redo everything over again) so it might help to clarify where the problem lies.

 

i just tested this on my m15x. i am getting around 11000 when my desktop gets 40...

i wonder whats the problem.

 

I did a fresh XP install and got the same high values with no drivers installed.

 

Yeah. I'm going to see if installing updated drivers from the fresh install would lower the latency.

Edit: Nope. Still around 11000us - 12000us.

 

Thanks Oceanus. You're providing some valuable data here. Keep running the app for every driver change you do to your system and see if anything changes.

I've been doing some more research and have seen some people suggest that this has to do with powermizer settings on our nvidia cards. I first thought that sounded like a great explanation because the new 177.92 driver I installed didn't have such aggressive powermizer settings meaning that I unfortunately was having an idle temp of 73C! Then, to my horror I booted up today and found that the latency was not only back to all above 12000us but I now get spikes all the way up to 29000us! This is actually so bad that vista is quite noticeably lagging because of this.

The good news is that I have found a tool called RATTv3

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/DevTools/tools/RATT.mspx

Basically it does the same as "DPC Latency Checker" but it measures driver by driver and will output the latency driver by driver meaning that we can actually pinpoint exactly where the problem is. Unfortunately I haven't quite figured out the app yet so if anyone wants to give it a shot please feel free.

 

I don't think RATTv3 plays all that nice with Vista. XP users can still give it a go though. For Vista MS have created something else:

Windows Performance Tools Kit

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/perftools.mspx

I'm messing around with it too see if I can make some sense of it.

 

thx for all the updates fr33m4n....

 

In the link I posted earlier there is an app called xperf. Basically all it does is tell the windows kernel to log whatever you want it to log. Then you have to use xperfview to graph out the result, but it will also tell you what exactly caused the spike. I don't quite have all the parameters nailed down but if anyone wants to give it a go I suggest these articles:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ntdebugging/archive/2008/04/03/windows-performance-toolkit-xperf.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/pigscanfly/pages/xperf-articles.aspx

 

I get an average of 1k with x32 bios and .72 drivers. But I had 1 spike of 12k. Will try to update driver and bios and test your programs, but unfortunately no time today. Again, thanks Freeman for showing us the problem.

 

If the DPC Latency checker basically measures the performance of real-time audio/video streams, would that have any correlation to the audio popping issue and the lag that happens when you perform certain functions? (ex. eject/close the DVD drive)

I think I recall whizzo saying that the reason why he did not update to the X34 BIOS was because of the audio popping issue and with the X32 BIOS, he was getting significantly lower us' than those who have the X34 BIOS installed. Maybe that has some correlation to the audio quality we've been getting?

In any case, I'll try out the new program(s) you've provided us. So far, the new drivers I've installed (which includes the 177.92 NVIDIA drivers, updated Realtek HD audio drivers, and updated Media card reader drivers have no effect on the us). I'll be seeing if I can get my hands on any other updated drivers later today and will test them out for you

 

I just instaled the newest bios (x34) and guess what? my latency jumped from about 1k to a constant 11-12k. So can this indicate that this is a bios problem? will try to update my video card drivers, and if that doesn't work, I will go back to x32.

 

just curious why a BIOS could/would effect the latency?

 

I think it might actually be the X34 BIOS because I too have steered clear from it, just to avoid any serious issues on my m15x. I average around 1000us - ~400us min. - spikes can be as high as ~4000us (Absolute Maximum: 4137).

 

Here you go ryujin, as Freeman says, it can be BIOS

 

Well im on the x32 bios and i never go above 138 which i guess is good?

Tom

 

thx impressive....i now remember reading that...
(memory is not what it used to be )

 

Topper this is very good. I am going back to x32

 

This would not surprise me at all, and if I still had the X32 BIOS I would have gone back myself and tried if that made any difference.

What kind of annoys me is that right after I had installed the nvidia 177.92 drivers, but before I had rebooted I was getting latency all the way down to 1000us. It would be very weird if some action I did that did not involve the BIOS would lower my latency by that much if the bottleneck was still in place.

So, today I uninstalled the nvidia drivers and throughly cleaned out my system with Driver Cleaner Pro. I then wanted to install the newest WHQL driver but but somehow screwed up so after I had reset I just installed the 177.92 drivers again. This time however I never got those low latency readings.

Currently I am trying to figure out "xperf" as it seems to be the most promising lead in pinpointing this issue. The main problem I have with it is that I can't get the spikes in xperf to correlate to the spikes in DPC Latency Checker.

 

The BIOS is looking more and more like the source of the problems and it would also be a very definitive answer to the audio issues with the X34 BIOS. Anyone still have the X32 BIOS and be willing to share it?

 

save it for all of us to fr33m4n....lol
i would gander that new units would ship with the x34 and not the x32?