DPC latency, Ryzen versus Intel and the latest Windows 10 20H2 build

Heartfeltdawn

Drew and I have been gassing about latency recently as he's building up a Death Star-level Ryzen system and I've been swearing at my i5-8300H laptop and piecing together an R5 3600 desktop. The short story with the laptop is that it drove me to distraction after going through every tweak known to man (not helped by the shitty BIOS: really basic job) so I wiped everything yet again, and decided we'd go for broke. Full install of 1903, then update to 1909, and then the big kahuna: straight into the October 2020 W10 20H2 update. 

First impressions are very good so I'll break it down for both machines. 

i5-8300H laptop: 8GB, Adata SX8200 Pro 1TB NVMe SSD, Geforce MX150 graphics

When 1909 was installed, it was fucking irritating. Lots of storport.sys problems that wouldn't go away, the acpi.sys issues were annoying too. This was partly eliminated by disabling the battery and making it run on adapter juice only. Recently something changed and I was getting clicks with a Native Instruments Komplete Audio 2 interface and then with an SPL Crimson interface. Bought the Babyface Pro FS and it is a lot better but still latency spikes were appearing when using Latency Mon. When you get bad shit with RME gear, then it's clearly a bigger issue than driver. 

I installed W10 20H2 this morning. It takes quite some time to get together and install. I then installed Throttlestop just to stop the turbo boost kicking in and making the fans whine and tweaked the power settings to maximum performance. Everything else is stock.  

Set LatencyMon running for an hour: no issues. System is good. Wow! For the first time in ages! Redid the test for an hour and went into town, came back, and found Windows Update had auto-installed a new chipset driver and a new cumulative update for .NET framework. Big spike of 681us for the ndis.sys Network Driver... but didn't fuck the system for audio. LM says it's all good. This is a massive difference as this laptop has never been easy to set up for pop-free audio. I haven't even tried it with the Babyface Pro yet nor have I started tweaking things to reduce the latency. To have something that basically works straight from a clean installation is brilliant. 

Ryzen 5 3600 desktop: 16GB, PNY 1TB NVMe m.2, Geforce RTX2060 graphics

Desktops generally have much less DPC latency on 'em. Windows 7 systems I had in the past were very low latency machines but it is fair to say Windows 10 is a bit more latency happy. Running W10 20H2 on the Ryzen machine is staggering. This build isn't set up for audio at all. It's my sim racing rig. No tweaks at all, all stock. The Nvidia graphics cards are well known for causing DPC latency issues compared to the AMD Radeon cards so I'm basically going with a fast PC with a whacking graphics card with known issues. 

I've had three LatencyMon sessions on it now and it has truly tiny levels of latency. Haven'[t installed the BFP on here either, all the audio is going out via the graphics card to the telly at the minute. If a non-tweaked system like this can run so well for audio, then goodness knows what the stats would be when tweaked. 

It does beg the question: do Ryzen systems inherently have lower DPC latency than Intel? Saw this thread over at GS and ot does seem that some people are seeing very low DPC latency on Ryzen laptops compared with the shitty levels seen on stuff like the much vaunted Dell XPS range. 

https://www.gearslutz.com/board/music-computers/1304787-ryzen-laptops-way-future-portable-windows-recording.html

Thinking of going for a Ryzen laptop next year. Has anyone jumped and bought one and, if so, what's your experiences of it with regard to audio? 

Oh, and install W10 20H2. It's worth it. 

Rich210

I've got a 3600x chip and latency on ableton with that native instruments interface is silly fast! 

Heartfeltdawn

First little quirk with LatencyMon:

microsoft.photos.exe causes a lot of hard pagefaults as a background process. Going to the Photos app and turning it all off (ie. search for folders and whatnot) actually removes microsoft.photo.exe from the list of processes going on. Literally disappears. 

Running another load of LatencyMon tests on both machines, this time running Chrome streaming video. No issues thus far after 45 minutes.

New Start Menu with 20H2: there is some bloatware in there. Stuff like Skype and Spotify are going to be deleted. 

Using Chrome or Edge: doesn't appear to be any advantage for one over the other when it comes to latency. Slightly more processes going on behind the scenes with Chrome. More hard pagefaults with Edge. 

Sync settings for desktop colour themes: I can change it on the laptop, see it update on the desktop, and see the slight jump in latency on the desktop because of that. For some reason I find this rather cool mostly because I am stupid. 

Heartfeltdawn

Rich210 said:

I've got a 3600x chip and latency on ableton with that native instruments interface is silly fast! 

@Rich210 what sort of latency times are you getting out of Ableton? 

Rich210

Maxed out I'm getting 0.32 ms. But I've not pushed the processor with elaborate tracks yet . 

Rich210

The 3600x is plugged into a b550 tomahawk and I've got massive cooler on it which I think helps a lot. I've not needed to overstock it yet but from what I understand  the chips a really sensitive to temps and do some magic when running cool. 

Rich210

Rich210 said:

Maxed out I'm getting 0.32 ms. But I've not pushed the processor with elaborate tracks yet . 

The 0.64ms at 192k with the buffer at 60 so it's not really real world  testing. 

Heartfeltdawn

Still sounds like it's working alright though. Glad the interface got to you in decent time considering the avalanche Royal Mail is coping with at the minute. 

On the DPC front, I've finally got the desktop to say it has issues. As predicted and expected, it's the Nvidia driver. First negative in four hours of testing so no problem with it. 

Have found on the laptop that the BFP on a USB2 slot causes some power issues and spikes. Again, not unexpected as the adapter with the laptop is pretty low powered. 

Rich210

It arrived in one piece thanks to your superb packing! 

Sounds like you're having a lot of fun with the build though. I took a very similar approach but I picked up a 5700xt graphics card that was a diva I've learned to please. I had a load of issues from the start though but the drivers are getting better on the amd side! 

I'm definitely  a Ryzen fan and might do an upgrade on the processor in a few months once the gen 3 stuff has stabilised. I might put a micro PC together for a potential mini studio project. 

Heartfeltdawn

Drew's got the real fun with his Death Star Ryzen. I just get to fiddle with a laptop that has a very limited BIOS by comparison. 

The desktop R5 sim racing but now proven to be fine for audio machine is pretty small. 

https://i.imgur.com/pjvWKHX.png
https://i.imgur.com/yRPBvch.png

Fractal Core 500 case, MSI B450I Gaming Plus AC mini ITX board, 16GB RAM, PNY NVMe 1TB SSD, Ryzen 5 3600 processor, EVGA 500 watt PSU. Fanwise there's one on the PSU, a couple of the Gigabyte RTX2060 GPU, and the processor gets cooled by a Noctua NH-U14S fan which just about fits in the case. Really happy with everything in it now. If I ever stop racing and turn it into an audio only computer, then the graphics card would get dumped for something passive and Radeon. The slight flaw is that the new gen Radeon cards don't appear to have many if any passive options. 

Freebird

Try something like this ..

https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

Don't forget to set a restore point and export a copy of your settings, as any new windows updates may break them.

I am still experimenting with different things, so I may add some more later ...

RIP Cortana and the rest of the spyware cr@p