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Slowdown or lag with NVIDIA 560 Ti in some games

Tags:
  • Nvidia
  • Lag
  • Games
  • Graphics
Last response: in Graphics & Displays
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August 13, 2013 6:22:23 AM

In *some* 3D games, but not all, I experienced an odd effect: once about every 6 seconds, the game's frame rate would drop for about a second. There was no other effect: sound was OK and there were no crashes.

Reducing graphics options to lowest did not some to have much of a positive effect.

The list of games in which this occurred seemed quite arbitrary, and a mix of old and new games: Assassin's Creed 1, Metro 2033, Cryostatis, Oil Rush. Many other games (Steam Engine games, for example) and all 2D games seemed to run just fine.

This was extremely frustrating, as it made many good games unplayable.

The particular combination of hardware and software that may have been the culprit:

* EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti (1GB RAM)
* ASUSTeK M5A88-M motherboard
* AMD Phenom II X6 1090T CPU
* Windows 7 64bit

What didn't I try! Lots of in-game settings, switching to DirectX 9 for many games, fiddling with options in the NVIDIA control panel, downgrading the NVIDIA drivers, GPU overclocking, fiddling with BIOS settings, and finally reinstalling Windows: a huge pain. None of that solved the problem

Finally, I did find the solution, which I will post below. :) 

More about : slowdown lag nvidia 560 games

Best solution

August 13, 2013 6:26:23 AM

Is this a question is it solved now?
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August 13, 2013 6:33:50 AM

The issue was solved by disabling the HD Audio driver for the graphics card:

1. Open the Windows Control Panel.
2. Search for and open the Device Manager.
3. Under "Display adapters" double click your graphics card.
4. Go to the "Details" tab, and choose "Location information". Note which PCI bus number it is: in my case, it was "PCI Bus 1".
5. Back in the Device manager, under "System devices" you may find several "High Definition Audio Controller" entries. Click on them one by one and repeat step #4 to find the PCI bus. Look for the entry that matches the PCI bus number for your video card.
6. Once you found it, right click on the entry and choose "Disable".

For me, this fixed things immediately: I didn't even have to reboot. My games now run as smooth as butter.

You will find the above as a solution to other problems: some people report problems with BSODs and even logging into Windows. I did not experience these problems. I only experienced lag/slowdown.

I hope this helps somebody else! I wasted many, many frustrating hours trying to solve this problem.

I don't know why this solution works. Someone somewhere mentioned a possible IRQ conflict between the video and audio drivers that causes them to compete over the PCI connector. I don't know where this could be solved, but I imagine it's an NVIDIA driver bug. (I'm using 320.49.)
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