New DAW, CbB experiencing periodic momentary UI redraw freeze [RESOLVED!]

[Colin Nicholls]

Help! My new DAW is exhibiting jerky video display redraws, very distracting.

 

RESOLUTION:

There was a plugin in my project that was performing a periodic activation check on the UI thread, causing the screen redraws to be interrupted.

I discovered this by opening each VST property window in the project in turn, until Modartt Pianoteq 4 displayed with a "Activation Needed" popup, which is otherwise completely invisible.

After clearing the activation warning by activating the plugin, the screen redraws returned to normal.

Obvious Clues in hindsight:

• Audio playback was smooth and unaffected; only visual effects observed
• The problem was consistent and apparent whether playing back or just manipulating the UI while the project was open:
  • Scrolling up and down in the Track View
  • Observing the Aim Assist line "sticking" as the mouse cursor moves about
  • Observing Control Bar modules "sticking" when rearranging them
  • The NOW time indicator and current M:B:T display would "stick" during playback
• Changing CPU related parameters such as core parking, thread optimization, etc, had no effect
• Smaller projects with few or no plugins played back with no visual interruption
• Other DAWS played back complex projects with no visual interruption (*)
• This was a new computer and much software had been freshly installed, user settings transferred, and licensing prompts acknowledged and dismissed.

I hope this helps other folks who may be trying to solve similar issues in the future.

 

ORIGINAL POST:

Any advice gratefully received. Here's the details:

Problem description:

• If I scroll up/down with the mouse wheel, the Track View updates in fits and starts. (whether playing back or idle)
• During playback, the NOW time marker horizontal motion freezes every few seconds, along with the transport time indicator display also freezing
• happens for less than a second every few seconds, consistently.

Note:

• Audio playback appears to be rock solid and sounds great if I close my eyes and don't look at the screen

Steps taken so far:

• Checked for accidental engagement of CPU-save mode (Pause/Break key). Not applicable (can only make it worse!)
• Checked Performance monitor for Core-parking. Yes it was happening
• Installed and used ParkControl to configure power profiles that disable core parking.  DID NOT FIX ISSUE (but might have reduced it slightly)

Background:

• It's a new DAW!
• Intel NUC Extreme Dragon Canyon form-factor
• Intel i9-12900 processor (16 cores, potentially 24 threads)
• Video is using integrated GPU, intel UHD 770
• 32G RAM, SSDs, the works
• Currently using Focusrite Scarlett 6i6 USB 2.0 Audio interface (ASIO)

 

Next steps:

Although I feel the integrated graphics should be fine - @msmcleod concurs with this - I think maybe the next step is to try installing a separate GPU? I have a NVideo card from my old DAW I could install and try and see if I see a difference.

BIOS settings I should try? I feel like this should be a speed demon out of the box, frustrating!

Thanks in advance for your thoughts on this one

 

Additional notes

Performance module, before disabling core-parking:

Performance module, after disabling core-parking:

... I have no idea why the "used" cores have moved around.

 

UPDATE:

Here's a video of the issue. Typically it was super-aggressive until I activated LiceCap and then it wasn't so severe. But it is still visible.

The low frame rate makes it a little harder to see also:

LiceCap gif of issue

Observe:

• See how the Aim Assist and Performance Module do not smoothly track the mouse
• See how the NOW time and M:B:S indicator freeze momentarily and periodically during playback

 

 

Edited July 6, 2023 by Colin Nicholls

[Lord Tim]

This sounds like a driver issue to me, although being integrated, it's fairly unlikely.

Definitely give the NVIDIA a go for troubleshooting at least. Those specs should eat anything you throw at it for breakfast out of the box with no tweaking.

What resolution and how many monitors are you running? You might want to check your refresh rates in the Intel graphics utility as well.

[JnTuneTech]

Do the jerky screen draws occur outside of CbB as well?  I would try running Windows Task Manager, Processes - (show all if needed), and while the problem is occurring, click the column sorting on CPU usage, and see if any of the spikes show up in concert with the freezes, and find out detail on what processes are causing that. -If that works at all for you. Maybe you've already done that?

I say that, because I have a similar problem with my laptop (whenever NVIDIA drivers are updated in my case) that I stop by shutting down the background process (and removing it from startup) that causes it. Maybe you have something similar going on.

[Colin Nicholls]

33 minutes ago, Lord Tim said:

This sounds like a driver issue to me, although being integrated, it's fairly unlikely.

Definitely give the NVIDIA a go for troubleshooting at least. Those specs should eat anything you throw at it for breakfast out of the box with no tweaking.

What resolution and how many monitors are you running? You might want to check your refresh rates in the Intel graphics utility as well.

Thanks for the advice, good ideas, some of which I was part way into implementing when your response came in.

Concerning the GPU:

• Video refresh rate is 60 Hz and seems optimal. The monitor is Viewsonic VP2770 and is native rez at 2560x1440, 100% scaling.
• Trying a separate NVIDIA graphics card showed that it did not appear to be video driver or GPU hardware related. Basically, I could see no difference.
• There's a setting in Windows Settings that appears with the nVidia card installed, "use hardware acceleration". I don't remember seeing it before. Setting it ON made no difference.
• I have since removed the card from the chassis and returned to the integrated GPU.

Concerning CbB project size:

• Obviously I first saw this issue when I opened one of my large-ish projects (not to get into a size comparison here. My older DAW had no issues with it).
• There is a relationship between size of the project and display update behavior. Opening a tiny project (one track of piano driving Modartt Pianoteq) showed NO TRACE of the hesitant or freezing.
• I tried opening a second, large-ish project and observed even worse laggy scroll and play back display updates.

This bothers me because it doesn't seem to be a specific plugin that I can pin this on.
If this new box can't handle an average sized project that my last box (i7-8600 , 6 cores) handled with no issues, then color me very depressed because as Lord Tim says, this hardware config shouldn't even be breaking a sweat.

And... it's not. I mean, performance monitor is barely registering. During playback:

 

Next things to try:

• Disable WiFi/Internet/Networking
• Turn XBox Game Mode on?

 

[Colin Nicholls]

4 minutes ago, JnTuneTech said:

Do the jerky screen draws occur outside of CbB as well? 

Not that I've noticed, JnTuneTech. I'm familiar with Task Manager ?

[Colin Nicholls]

Concerning networking:

• I disabled my network adapter, and opened Cakewalk and the project.
• Noticed that it seemed to stick for a while during loading plugins, on BREVERB
• BREVERB wasn't activated, and was complaining about demo mode.
• I reconnected to the Internet, and authorized the plugin with my serial number.
• Disconnected from Internet.
• Re-opened project.
• Commenced playback - no change. Issue persists.

Conclusion:

• The root cause doesn't appear to be related to the availability of the Internet/network.
• Have I really authorized ALL the plugins?

Next Steps:

• I have difficulty believing this is related to my Focusrite USB interface which is my backup device. I currently don't have a backup-backup but I'm waiting on the delivery of a new Thunderbolt audio interface, so when it arrives, we'll try comparing. 
• And, no doubt, deal with other problems I've not yet known related to Thunderbolt.

[Lord Tim]

Taking the Focusrite out, what happens if you run WASAPI Exclusive using the onboard sound?

This doesn't seem like it'll be anything that will have any effect but it'll be one more thing you can check off at least.

Still giving this some thought here...

[Lord Tim]

If you want to get a bit more granular with what you're seeing in CbB, grab the Sysinternals Process Utilities and give Process Monitor and/or Process Explorer a go with Cakewalk as the filter and see what it's trying to do. That should at least give you some clues if it's trying excessive disk I/O, getting caught up on a file or a reg entry or trying to auth something over the net.
 

3 hours ago, Colin Nicholls said:

There's a setting in Windows Settings that appears with the nVidia card installed, "use hardware acceleration". I don't remember seeing it before. Setting it ON made no difference.

I was going to suggest this when you had the NVIDIA in - what that does is force an application to use either internal graphics or discrete graphics for an application, and obviously this didn't matter in your case.
 

Maybe try a nuke of the UHD770 and a fresh driver install?

DDU: https://www.intel.com.au/content/www/au/en/support/articles/000091878/graphics.html

Clean Install: https://www.intel.com.au/content/www/au/en/support/articles/000057389/graphics.html

Fresh UHD770 drivers: https://www.intel.com.au/content/www/au/en/support/articles/000090440/graphics.html

And then I'd have a look in the control panel applet once it's all in to verify it's all set up correctly.

[Larioso]

I just come to think of the old Optimize for appearance or performance dialog.

- I would test turning for performance so all visuals stuff are gone

- as a test

Redrawing stuff make me think it might be relevant.

- had long ago that shadows under mouse or popup menus etc could even create crackles in audio

- so a windows visuals thing

[chris.r]

5 hours ago, Colin Nicholls said:

Performance module, before disabling core-parking:

Performance module, after disabling core-parking:

Please forgive me the off topic, but what is core-parking and should I care for it? (and is it something I can adjust on my own being a musician and not a programmer so having not much experience with bios or group policy settings?) TIA

[Colin Nicholls]

14 minutes ago, chris.r said:

what is core-parking and should I care for it?

Good question. I think if you are not experiencing performance issues then you don't need to worry about it. It's good for laptops and other devices that need to conserve power and aren't running real-time applications.

I wouldn't have worried about it either, except that I'm clutching at CPU-shaped straws.

In my case it clearly does something because the CPU performance histogram changes substantially.

Edited July 5, 2023 by Colin Nicholls

[Colin Nicholls]

1 hour ago, Lord Tim said:

Maybe try a nuke of the UHD770 and a fresh driver install?

It just does feel like a video driver issue doesn't it. I think I'd have to put the nVidia card back in the slot, or maybe it would revert to "generic video adapter" or some such. And, good call on sysInternals.

[chris.r]

4 minutes ago, Colin Nicholls said:

I wouldn't have worried about it either, except that I'm clutching at CPU-shaped straws.

Thanks. Your NUC specs seems amazing comparing to my bit older hp elitedesk mini with 6th gen i7 and your intel UHD is again much better than mine, and still my lovely little box is quite capable even today. You should expect it smashing awesome with the Cakewalk/Scarlett tandem assuming both video and audio drivers are fine. I'm pretty sure you did check if you didn't accidentally hit the Pause/Break button on your keyboard.

[Lord Tim]

14 minutes ago, Colin Nicholls said:

It just does feel like a video driver issue doesn't it. I think I'd have to put the nVidia card back in the slot, or maybe it would revert to "generic video adapter" or some such. And, good call on sysInternals.

I think it just goes "ahh crap! Gotta reboot" when you take out the driver and then you do the flashing screen dance when it starts back up again. The instructions are pretty comprehensive though, so that should get you by without needing to throw your other card back in.

33 minutes ago, chris.r said:

Please forgive me the off topic, but what is core-parking and should I care for it?

Yeah, what Colin said, basically. It's a way to conserve battery more or less. If it's not causing you issues, ignore it, but if you're getting clicks and pops and you've gone through the rest of the checklist like proper drivers, nothing causing intermittent latency (which you can check with LatencyMon) then checking to see if your system is shutting down a core and then bringing it back online is a good place to look. It's not something I've really needed to do, even on my laptops, but it's good to have in the knowledge toolkit for sure!

[Lord Tim]

Just another couple of thoughts here, before you try the fresh video driver install, that a lot of these NUCs have very specific drivers for them, including the video driver. The generic Intel one will probably work fine, but they do give you a disclaimer to use the manufacturer one first.

But further to that, I remember on my old NUC that there were a few other system updates that I needed to make sure was in there or it ran like garbage. Have you had a chance to go to the product page and grab the latest drivers for everything and install them? This might actually be PCI bus related where stuff isn't making it to where it needs to go in a timely fashion.

[Colin Nicholls]

2 minutes ago, Lord Tim said:

Have you had a chance to go to the product page and grab the latest drivers for everything and install them?

Uh, no, I haven't. That's another good idea.

I was about to try the "remove Intel integrated video driver" trick you mentioned above, but instead I had a thought. Cakewalk is not my only DAW: I use Studio One's project page for album mastering, or at least, I used to. (Cakewalk's Audio Export dialog + Arrangement lane - I confess - has largely made that unnecessary) but i still keep it around, and in fact, I recently took advantage of an email offer and upgraded from v.3 to v.6, but hadn't installed it on this new machine yet.

Well, I just installed it, and downloaded the Alina Smith demo project.

Okay, look, I don't want to turn this into a brand war or anything. For me, this is just another data point: Studio One playback and video redraws was flawless. And that "Rhythm of the Night" demo is pretty heavy as plugins goes. I'm not super-familiar with how to read S1's performance monitor but the CPU meter was hovering at 15% which kind of feels about right.

This makes me feel a lot better about my choice of hardware :-). The issue no longer feels like an intrinsic  CPU- or Video- driver problem. It feels more like some kind of configuration problem on the Cakewalk side.

I want to call this all a "clean Cakewalk install" but the truth is, it may be picking up stuff from my C:\Users or C:\ProgramData folders that I restored as part of moving my files over. That said, I've never experienced this kind of issue in my last two DAW upgrades.

Maybe I need to reprofile aud.ini or something like that, could it be that simple? I'm doubtful.  I will try it, and also the other things you've suggested.

For me, this is still an on-going diagnostic project.

 

 

[scook]

Is the DAW excluded in the AV software?

[Lord Tim]

^^ Good thinking too!

I wouldn't put a massive amount of weight on the S1 vs CbB thing just yet since we don't know how each respective app paints to the screen, and we know that CbB currently is very bitmap based, so it could well be that S1 is using the GPU in a different way (I believe it's all vector based, and Sonar / Next will do something similar), especially since you're seeing CPU usage and general playback being pretty much fine in CbB other than the redrawing.

Edited July 5, 2023 by Lord Tim

[Promidi]

What happens if you disable C-States and speedstep (maybe called IEST - (intel enhanced speed step)  in the BIOS?

[mettelus]

Didn't read through the entire thread, so not sure if you checked the input devices - a wireless mouse in particular. Low batteries or dust on the optics (for the wireless/optical variety) can wreak havoc on inputs. Those devices drivers can also be "reset" on the fly by unplugging the USB FOB and plugging that back in.