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    Alienware 13 R3: case of the stuttering video

    Discussion in '2015+ Alienware 13 / 15 / 17' started by shutterbc, Apr 23, 2017.

  1. shutterbc

    shutterbc Notebook Geek

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    Hopefully it's OK for me to open a new thread on this while I attempt to troubleshoot the oft-cited "micro-stutter" issue mentioned elsewhere on this forum. I'm eventually hoping to track down and kill off a number of items that are bugging me, but I'll start with the big ones.

    Some issues I'm troubleshooting:
    • Multi monitor mode: some Chrome extensions don't interpret mouse cursor location properly when on scaled monitor
    • Google Hangouts can only share primary display and crashes Chrome when trying to share MS Office windows.
    • Memory corruption BSODs
    • Chrome window randomly hangs for several seconds when browsing some pages or switching windows. Occurs in other apps too to a lesser extent, sometimes causes mouse cursor slowdown.
    • Trackpad scroll gesture gets confused when scrolling slowly in Chrome
    • App crashes: access violation error in some games or apps that use 3d acceleration
    • Tobii eye tracker doesn't always dim the screen when I am away from the machine
    FYI I do OS level troubleshooting as part of my job, so this is going to get a little in the weeds. TLDR: I found that some of my issues are due to Intel drivers, and the proof is below.

    Initial traces of app hang / video stutter issue
    I am able to reproduce UI hangs when switching windows or scrolling through web pages in Chrome. Yes clicking the battery icon also seems to produce a "micro-stutter" but it isn't very long in my case. For some reason, some page elements in Chrome can hang the window for several seconds, which is way easier for me to detect in a trace.

    The first thing I did was use Process Monitor / Process Hacker to confirm which process took 100% CPU during these UI hangs. In my case, I found it to be the SYSTEM process, and more specifically a thread associated with ntoskrnl.exe. After that, it's a dead end. Time to switch to kernel traces.
    [​IMG]

    I reproduced one of these hangs while running Windows Performance Recorder (which is built into Windows 10). I checked CPU usage (and I/O and network too, though it wasn't really necessary in this case).
    [​IMG]
    This image shows that the driver associated with the system CPU usage is "dxgmms2.sys" and under that, "igdkmd64.sys". Here are descriptions for those two drivers:

    dgxmms2.sys: DirectX Graphics MMS
    [​IMG]

    igdkmd64.sys: Intel Graphics Kernel Mode Driver
    [​IMG]

    The actual function called, as far as the symbols will show me, is related to flushing / building the paging buffer. This would be called a lot when offloading any number of graphics tasks to the GPU including updating the contents of a window or creating a new window. Basically, I believe it's used all the time in Windows 10.

    OK, so now I know why I may have this issue cropping up all the time -- now what do I do to fix it?

    Well, I see that I've already got the latest Nvidia drivers (which didn't help other than possibly net me some new memory corruption BSODs). I have not yet updated Intel drivers though. Mine are still 21.20.16.4574 from 12/23/2016. The ones on the web site ( https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/26669/Graphics-Intel-Graphics-Driver-for-Windows-15-45-) are from 3/25/2017 at version 21.20.16.4627. Worth a shot anyway.

    Will upgrade and see what happens next...

    EDIT 4/23/2017:
    So far so good. Graphics seem MUCH more responsive. I just rebooted though; will give it some more time to burn in.
     
    Last edited: Apr 23, 2017
    EvolutionX and Vasudev like this.