I haven't seen this discussed in a couple years and Im in the process of upgrading. Last go round I went with a AMD Vega64. I also use my computer to work in Autocad (real work) and the occasional game.

My question is has the new generations of Nvidia done anything for the latency spike issues of the past?
Im wanting to get a RTX 3070 but scared to death of the latency spikes and not seeing anyone address this issue on the newer GPU's. I may have to go with AMD RX 6000 series on the AMD side but prefer the Nvidia route.

Anyone on here have a 20 or 30 series card and are there any issues with Latency????

 

Last edited: Dec 5, 2020

no problems with GTX 1080 Ti here, but I'm mostly on hackintosh MacOS,

one big change I noticed recently with (occasionally booting into) Windows is, nVidia drivers are kind of fucked up with UWP MS Store, so by default you download only part of the driver from nVidia website, and Control Panel has to be installed from Store - this can be whole ignored if driver package is downloaded via Advanced nVidia search and "Standard" is chosen instead default "DCH"

AMD is rather new and people report inferior/incomplete/unreliable experience with drivers, which are luckily updated a lot to mitigate the issues - personally I wouldn't rush into latest generation of gpus, especially for audio workstations where it's not really needed

 

What I noticed with Nvidia cards is that the more powerful it is, the bigger the DPC latency. One of the explanations could be that more powerful video cards use more PCIe lanes and therefore use more CPU cycles. Also, some drivers are more DPC friendly than the others, but the difference isn't that big. The newest Nvidia card I have at disposal is GT 730 DDR5 and it uses 8xPCIe lanes as opposed to more powerful ones that use full 16x lanes, and it's got the lowest DPC latency of all 4 Nvidias I have. It's also the least power hungry at 25-30W. Pretty low, eh?

I cannot post any results, because I chucked it out of the audio computer in favour of the internal Intel HD630 that has incredibly low DPC latency to any external graphic card I have ever had a pleasure to "play" with. I always check DPC latency in every of my builds and I try to make it as low as possible so the user can use more plugins without any crackling.

I wonder what the DPC latency of an AMD 2400G, AMD 3400G, and AMD 3200G is. I suppose low, since they have internal Vega cards 8 and 11. Intel computers with optimised Windows 7 and HD630 [i7-7700K] or HD530 [i7-6700K] never go above 60 in the DPC latency test, whilst this best Nvidia GT730 I have always have peaks up to 250 or more no matter what I do. Other Nvidia cards do even worse due to using all 16x PCIe lanes.

This could be an interesting thread, if we manage to keep the fanbois and trolls away from it...

Please post some results if possible. No matter what card! Internal, external, AMD, Nvidia, Intel, Matrox... DPC Latency Checker is easy to find, download and install. It's portable, it won't ruin your precious OS.

 

It's always a great idea to buy a bit older card, research it, install a mature driver, than be a beta tester for any company.

 

Ive read so many things it makes my head spin. Crazy thing is Nvidia's on a MAC old or new dont have the DPC spikes that windows have.
Some attribute it to the windows drivers, others to old motherboards. I'm hoping the new PCI 4.0 standard may clear up these spikes somehow. My Vegas 64 has 16 lanes with no issues. Previously a 1060 on the same motherboard I had huge spikes.

 

Last edited: Dec 5, 2020

I'd also wait at least until people report problems and they fix the drivers, whether is AMD or nVidia.
As you perfectly know traditionally nVidia (drivers or perhaps the whole package) has had latency issues.
Perhaps they don't give a flying turd about anything that's not gaming or AI.

One thing I'm not sure 100% is that the number of memory lanes affect bandwidth but not latency.
I think the scenario is similar at when you only have one (normal, for CPU) DRAM module vs 2 in your motherboard. The speed doubles, the latency remains the same.

I could be totally wrong because GPUs are another beasts. Also like has been said the architecture of nVidia and AMD new series is quite different.

 

Last edited: Dec 5, 2020

I almost forgot. Nvidia GPUs can be tweaked to death. Off the top of my head certain "pre-rendered frames" setting. I'm not sure if that helps with the latency we're talking here. Could do some tests, my GPU's ancient though, a GTX 550 Ti

 

Here's my experience, I'm running a Ryzen 3900x, 2070 Super, 32g 3200 MHz CL 16 ram. Been on this system for around a year.
I've never had any issues with latency spikes or anything of the sort. I run the studio drivers from Nvidia but I doubt that makes a huge difference. I've heard of people in the past having issues with Nvidia and latency, but haven't heard of anyone having a problem with it in a few years now, and I've never had an issue. I can run large projects, with many plugins and tracks, and still track live with a sample buffer of 32 and not have any weird latency issues or spikes or anything. Everything runs smooth as butter.

I do agree with other posters that it is generally not a good idea to be in the first wave of people to adopt a new card. I personally would wait for the Nvidia 3000 and AMD 6000 series to be out for awhile, and let people discover bugs, and let the developers fix them.

TL;DR I would wait till the new gen of cards have been out for around 6 months before buying, but otherwise I wouldn't worry about it much, as Nvidia seems to have their latency issues figured out.

 

Thank you Clayton123 for your reply. Its really adds to the information that is not readily available.
I had a friend run a bunch of tests on a 5900 with a rtx 3090. assembling the images so we all can look at them.

 

There are no latency probs with 10xx series Nvidias and forth reported afaik. I have both 1050ti and 1080 gtx and they exhibit really low dpc constantly, no spikes. I have also installed a bunch of 20xx series on workstation/music comps, no problems there either. I haven't got my hands on a 30xx series although, i will buy a 3060ti for myself when they become avail at a normal price.

 

Unexpectedly got a friend to run latencymon and linked me general information while streaming several sites online. If anyone wants to analyse and tell us what we are seeing go for it.

This is a 5900 12 core 24 thread proccessor with a Nvidea RTX 3090 video card Again heavy on the NET he runs several sites.

 

He mentioned he did not have the videocard sound option drivers loaded
Im pretty sure alot of the pagefaults are from the sites he is running. Basically has 4 live streaming channels out and alot going on. the 5900 is a beast.

 

Last edited: Dec 6, 2020

Thankyou for the reply.. really helpful information

 

I was generally happy with my evga nvidia gtx1070 ti 'ultra silent' on windows (7). However, every time i opened ozone 9's gui (cubase 10.5 pro) my fans were spinning-up substantially, which was really pissing me off - so much for 'ultra silent' i remember thinking... furthermore, the fans would occasionally fire-up for about 5-10 seconds, even when the rig was totally idle, how curious... So i did some digging about and it turns-out that you have to install nvidia drivers in a circumspect way, else you end-up with unwelcome/unneccesary telemetry & therefore higher dpc's etc.

Firstly, you have to fully uninstall the nvidia driver using Display Driver Uninstaller - this utility properly uninstalls all previous graphic card installation files and settings. Once that's done you need to download the latest driver for your card from nvidia. Once you done that you can install the driver by loading it through the excellent NVSlimmer utility, which allows for installation of only what you specifically want to install and absolutely nothing else - which is a fair bit less than gets installed under the hood if you use the nvidia installer directly.

Honestly, my DPCs etc have never been so sweet and i now enjoy imperceptible fan noise at all times during DAW operation - even with ozone 9 - hurrah!

 

Last edited: Dec 6, 2020

Had to register to chime up about this. My experience is as a programmer, in addition to music enthusiast. Really familiar with Windows 10, power user. With that out of the way: one of the reasons why Nvidia gets so much worse here is the use of the WBINVD instruction. Intel introduced it on the 486. It means Write Back and INValiDate the cache. All cache (L1, L2, L3) is flushed synchronously, then it returns control to the CPU. This is an absurdly expensive instruction to use, and Intel has officially recommended that nobody (including Operating Systems) use it under any circumstances because it's so expensive. It's also been superseded by newer instructions, like CLFLUSH, which can target specific cache line(s) instead of clobbering all of cache. It'd be nice, of course, if Nvidia fixed this, and endorsed and encouraged open source drivers. If this occurred, I might even switch! (Current GPUs are RX 5700/WX 9100, but I've owned lots of Nvidia cards over the years.)

Thanks for reading~.

P.S.: All of this is verifiable through research, Intel CPU programmer's manuals. It's a really terrible instruction to use, and there are many posts on the internet condemning its usage by Nvidia. It's trivial to disassemble the driver .sys file and check for the presence of the instruction. Both IDA Pro and the open source Ghidra identify the presence of this in modern drivers, unfortunately. ~800 microseconds latency is pretty badly high, more reasonable would be around 100-150 microseconds latency on a cleanly tuned system. Even with 100-150 microsecond latency, it's needing a fairly big buffer to totally eliminate clicks and pops from high-end matched pair stereo microphones on my system, for instance.

 

I got a 3070 to replace my GTX1080 on my dual booting system. The problem on my DAW partition though is thatI have it locked down on very old Win10 version 1511, and the new driver for 3070 cannot be installed on it, says it is too old. So for now, on the DAW I must just use the basic video adapter mode. It's not a very big deal though. Since everything otherwise works so well in the 1511, I am not yet reinstalling it. Update is not possible to run, it just fails. So it will need a clean install at some point. But for now, I just let it be. The 3070 is anyway meant for my gaming partition

 

Last edited: Dec 6, 2020

Cool tools. I ended up doing this in different way when I was optimizing my Windows 10 because of that bloat/spyware we all now know and "love". You know, a classic. I was horrified to see how much shit (services, processes, start-up, you name it) the nVidia drivers installed.

Nice! Real interesting explanations and they fit so well this issue. I ended up being a web developer but I would have loved to program more C/C++ low-level stuff, so I keep an eye on C++ programming.

Though still a really messed up thing to do, to "dirty" the cache, I can understand why they started to use it long ago.

The 486 was my first PC and that "cache" thing was a mystery to me (64KB, still remember). At that time the importance of the cache was way less important. But now I know the comparatively high latency of modern DDR (especially since the arrival and complete fail of the first DDR3 RAM) is the main bottleneck in many situations, so you have to make the most of the cache(s). Keeping the cache hot, optimize for that famous cache-read line size. One talk about data oriented programming really blew my mind. Well, you know these things way better than me and while at it I apologize in advance if I'm butchering what you said, this is over my head (@Haliax , help me!). So feel free to correct me.

Man, what a row of high level geek and even geek-programming cool posts I'm seeing lately. Fuck, too much to handle on a Sunday, I need a beer, I'll see myself out see ya guys

 

Last edited: Dec 6, 2020

This is exactly my experience. I went back from a GTX1080 to the GTX1650 card and now I have no more latency problems whatsoever. Also, the power consumption and the load on the power supply is lower, which has resulted in a quiet, almost inaudible system.

I had to make up my mind what it was, what I wanted. The PC is now optimized for audio editing, but it would be useless for gaming/3D applications.
But from the leftovers I could build an acceptable gaming PC/graphics workstation. Just separated.



P.s.: I've got a fanless AMD Card but - as always with AMD (for me) - I had endless driver problems. I installed the card in a (except for latency problems) excellent working system and nothing worked right anymore. The driver even bungled into the printer control and I couldn't print anything correctly.

 

Last edited: Dec 6, 2020

Most important Nvidia GPU tweak is:


Also remember to change Power Plan in Windows to Ultimate or High Performance.

By the way this indicates more of a network adapter "problem" than a graphic card problem:


Try disabling all network adapters in device manager (then take Latencymon test) and see if the "problem" goes away. Also the hard pagefaults numbers indicates that your pc doing something while taking the Latencymon test. The test should be done in idle not while browsing or opening apps.
See what's causing your high pagefaults by clicking this:

 

Last edited: Dec 6, 2020

Looks to me like the Latency issues of the past have really gone away in Nvidia video cards.
I ended up scoring a 5900x and a Radeon RX 6800. Absolutely no latency issues on that card.

Thanks for the info guys