Audio artifacting and high latencymon latency

TacticalTactics · March 24, 2020

About a week ago, I noticed short bursts of static in DCS, along with occasional hard crashes (sometimes application freeze, sometimes system restart). It seemed to improve when I had less open in the background (closing chrome/discord). It later occurred in other games and applications. Sometimes mouse inputs would be registered late.

I had updated my chipset drivers (I don't remember whether I did so before or after I noticed the artfacting), and then updated motherboard audio drivers, as well as updating steelseries software. I used latencymon to check and surely enough, Highest measured interrupt to process latency was reaching 2000-3000 microseconds. Reported ISR and DPC execution time also reported high values and showed dxgkrnl.sys and nvlddmkm.sys as the highest execution time. So I updated graphics drivers, using clean install and only installing the two essential drivers. USB C, PhysX, and Audio drivers were not installed. That did not help. I tried modifying my ram OC, disabling PBO, and even resetting the ram to 2133Mhz. Nothing did anything except resetting ram to 2133, which seemed to lower the ISR and DPC execution times greatly. But the interrupts to process latency was still 2500 or so. I tried changing the power plan in control panel to ryzen high performance, and applied my ram oc again, along with enabling PBO. It had the same effect as resetting the ram OC. I used malwarebytes to make sure there isn't malware either.

Relevant system specs:

Ryzen 7 3700X, PBO 300 230 230 x5

Gigabyte X570 Aorus Elite, bios is version F10, the oldest which had AGESA 1.0.0.4B. I haven't bothered to update since then since F11 and F12 reportedly only improve PCIe device and memory compatibility.

Patriot Viper Steel 4400C19, tightened down to 3733 14-15-15-30-48-1T 1.47V GDM enabled, tRFC 298

EVGA RTX 2070 XC Gaming, +131Mhz core, +915Mhz Mem

EVGA G3 650W

Windows 10 Home

Arctis 7 headset

Corsair K68 Keyboard

Logitech M510 mouse

Logitech Extreme 3D Pro joystick

At this point I'm running out of ideas, so any help is appreciated. If you need any log files or any more information I will try my best to provide it.