Solving Audio Dropouts / DPC Latency Issues With NVIDIA Drivers On Windows

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if you’re experiencing latency or dropouts on a system which was previously running fine, this could be the reason:

https://www.bluecataudio.com/Blog/tip-of-the-day/solving-audio-dropouts-dpc-latency-issues-with-nvidia-drivers-on-windows/

Almost 4ms of DPC latency is huge, and it means dropping audio buffers every time this delay happens! If interrupts from other drivers take too much time to execute, they may indeed prevent the audio driver from doing its work in time, as explained with more details in our Windows PC Optimization article.

After further investigation on the Internet, this issue has been happening to many people lately, and it may have been caused by the combination of recent Windows updates and issues with NVIDIA drivers, which of course you cannot disable!

Anyway, after trying every possible tweak described in this forum thread, one trick finally solved the problem, and I guess it may be applicable to other cases when DPC latency keeps being an issue for audio dropouts, and the faulty driver cannot be disabled.

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[nvidia dpc latency fix ready](Nvidia Software QA Manager Says Long-Awaited DPC Latency Fix Is Ready | Tom's Hardware

here’s a list if you’d like to see how your laptop performs: https://www.notebookcheck.net/DPC-Latency-Ranking-Which-laptops-and-Windows-tablets-offer-the-lowest-latency.504376.0.html

the laptop i’m trying to get operational is listed at around 3000. it is completely unusable, even at 512 samples.

the irony is that the last thing a musician needs in a laptop is video performance. where possible, if you could just disable the nvidia driver completely and use straight intel vga, all this would disappear.