I started noticing issues the last few months, same as manni (NVIDIA 4090). I was using old drivers (2022) for quite a while until new games dropped. I tried everything mentioned here, and it seems reverting to the 8 month old 531.79 driver is the only thing that stops the random 7 to 20 frame drops/repeats in a movie, usually within an hour of playtime. Using JRVR, any version of LAV filters. Tested using multiple versions of jriver (30.0.0.41 up until 31.0.84).
My setup is a bit different - my receiver cannot handle HDMI 2.1. So I have the 4090's HDMI 2.1 port attached to the HDMI 2.1 input on the 4K TV. This allows me to have 4K120hz for better framerate (24/30/23/29/59) matching, while the audio from another port goes to the receiver.
MadVR seems to have no issues or imperceptible framedrops. I run at 119 or 120 hz on my display, so one single framedrop is not noticeable. However, 7 to 20 drops/repeats in a row lasts half a second to one second - extremely noticeable and jarring.
Interestingly, this is most noticeable for high-bitrate content (Blu-ray and UltraHD Blu-ray with menus and remuxes in MKV), but no problems for lower bitrate stuff (under 20 megabits/sec, DolbyVision or HDR10).
Things I tried that made no difference:
- subtitles on or off
- vsync on/off in NVCP
- Prefer maximum performance in NVCP, on or off
- disable interrupt moderation on my NIC (10 gigabit file share from my NAS)
- Process Lasso CPU affinities, real-time or high process priorities
- GPU VRAM higher idle clocks (using gfrad utility to clock VRAM to 500 Mhz instead of 50 Mhz - this greatly improves DPC latency)
- Upgrade to Windows 11 23H2 from Windows 10 21H2
- increase LAV Splitter Maximum Queue Size and Maximum Packets to 1024 MB and 65535 packets, respectively
- WASAPI mode audio in JRiver
- clean install of jriver including wiping out leftover jriver configuration items (this fixed issues with audio device detection problems that I encountered while testing)
- various audio device settings - Stereo, 7.1, Dolby Atmos for Home Theater, 48Khz, 96Khz, 192Khz and so on
- custom video config using 76.1 LAV Filter and 78.0 LAV Filter
- HDR tone mapping on or off (HDR passthrough always enabled though)
- disable and enable Windows' Game Mode (Windows can detect if a game is running and add performance optimizations for them)
- Configure the NAS to never spin down the hard drives on idle - was thinking maybe a different drive spinning down interrupts the SATA/SAS drive transfers while streaming - but this made no difference
- killing extra processes like browers, superfluous USB devices
- different RAM timings (AMD AM5 CPUs and motherboards are infamous for RAM instability unless you endlessly tweak the RAM timings and BIOS settings for days), although I also noticed the same stutter issues on my old PC with i7-9700K + Z390 motherboard with NVIDIA 536.99 drivers.
- NVIDIA drivers 536.99, 537.34, 537.58 (these ones allegedly fix a DPC latency issue too, but I was not able to prove it using LatencyMon.exe)
I'll do more testing with 531.79. Boy, this will be a pain in the butt though, as I also game on this machine with the same home theater setup, and having the latest driver is often a *must have* to prevent game CTDs. Maybe I can try only using MadVR for remuxes/BDMVs, and JRVR for the dolbyvision lower-bitrate stuff. Although I haven't yet tested dropouts in JRiver/MadVR yet. I know that MPC-HC/MadVR has 0 dropouts/repeats regardless of driver version.
Things I haven't tried yet (this will take many more hours of testing):
- disable hardware accelerated GPU scheduling in Windows 10/11
- figure out if it is possible to install older NVIDIA High Definition Audio drivers - perhaps this could make a difference too?
Speculation: NVIDIA may have changed something with regards to GPU scheduling? Or maybe driver broke handling of queues (buffers not being released? memory leak?)? MadVR seems to have few issues but I understand that madshi must have spent a few years ensuring that driver bugs can be overcome with the queue system he created. I remember those years living with dropped/repeated frames - those were dark times.