Hi Guys!
 
I need your help as I've run out of ideas on what to try.
 
This is yet another "latency => drop out" thread, but I think I managed to isolate the problem and I'm about 99,99% sure that it's caused by the NVIDIA card (but pls tell me if I'm wrong).
 
Here's the situation:

1. I build a new beefy DAW (see specs in signature)
2. DAW runs nicely at low latency (ASIO buffer size 64 / 96), roundtrip 9-12 ms, using VS-700 & OctaCapture (VS EXPAND), but also occurs with single unit
3. LatencyMon reports highest execution times on in USBPORT.sys (0.07 - 0.29ms) while everything works OK; nvlddmkm.sys (NVIDIA Windows Kernel Driver) is way down the list (0.05ms) ...
4. About 2 1/2 to 3 mins into the playback of the song (small project!) all the sudden nvlddmkm.sys (NVIDIA) jumps to the top of the latency list and playback stops or crackles and restarts from the beginning
5. I have no clue what causes the graphic card to take action 3 mins into the song. Changing screenset and this kind of things have no impact and don't trigger this problem earlier. It seems to happen at random, but at every playback sometime after about 2.5 mins ...
6. I meanwhile deactivated the LAN card and all services related to network activity; all other unnecessary services are disabled as well. This is a standalone DAW with no other functionality and no network access.

I could try to post screenshots from LatencyMon if it helps.
 
BTW, this is X1d but of course also happens in X2 in the same manner.
 
Your help is much appreciated.
 
Rob
 
 
 

FWIW...  a long time ago when trying to get my DPC latency in Win7 back down to XP levels, I looked into a potential issue with NVIDIA drivers causing variable DPC latency by dynamically "throttling" the graphics processor according to the load. There was a tool that could theoretically set the chip to run at a fixed rate, but it didn't work on my system, and I eventually gave up trying to get control since it doesn't really cause any issues for me.

You might want to Google NVIDIA, Speed, Performance, Utility and related keywords to get more info, and see what's available now.

Gotta agree with Brundlefly on this. A friend has a DAW with SONAR 8.5 and an Nvidia GT 220 which does that same damn throttling thing. We would notice that when the machine was streaming video on youtube etc. everything was fine, but as soon as you stopped there would be a big spike in DPCs, into the red. The same happened when the machine was idle and you started doing something with graphics, fine then a big spike. 

My cousin had this problem with his machine and fixed it by getting an ATI card. $50 fix.
There's a reason why Studiocat and ADK both suggested, by pm, an ATI card as a good card.

FreeFly: what are you doing for chipset drivers and video drivers >?

StarTekh


FreeFly: what are you doing for chipset drivers and video drivers >?

As far as I know I'm using the latest drivers, certainly for video. motherboard drivers were updated by vendor before shipping to me 3 weeks ago, so should be the lastest, either

gustabo


My cousin had this problem with his machine and fixed it by getting an ATI card. $50 fix.
There's a reason why Studiocat and ADK both suggested, by pm, an ATI card as a good card.

I wouldn't mind swapping the cards because the one I got was cheap since I don't need GPU power for Sonar.
 
However, I wouldn't want to have the same problem again. So I'd appreciate if you could let me know which ATI card that was and whether it was for win 7 64 bit.

FreeFly sounds good, did you look in bios for speedstep and other power management options in bios and in os to see nothing is limited >? and how did you setup x-2 ..audio.. config. thread scheduling, is it set to 0 or 2 >? ..multy processor engine is enabled >?

Count me in as another person who had unresolvable audio problems with an nVidia card - solved with an ATI/AMD card.

HD5450