Framerate slowdowns only on Lenovo Legion y700?

[what9000]

I'm really liking the simplicity and functionality of virtual displays in Apollo and Artemis together, this feels like what streaming should be. Great work on the features and enhancements to both.

I am trying to get all of my devices working well on Apollo, but my y700 seems to be behaving oddly. No matter the game, I can get 120fps at native resolution, but it will occasionally crash to ~80fps across the board on incoming stream fps, decoding frame rate and rendering frame rate. After 10 to 20 seconds, it will climb back to 120fps. I show zero lost frames during the stream.

Reboots don't seem to fix it, nor do changing frame pacing settings or performance modes. The stream is stable when tried on a Samsung galaxy fold. When reverting to sunshine and moonlight with a dummy plug, the stream is once again stable on all devices.

Is there anything unique about the y700 and background tasks or settings that I may be missing?

[ClassicOldSong]

Try the pre-release version of Artemis and enable Warp Drive in Frame Pacing options. Also remove Artemis out from game booster(as described in the release note), you can get 144hz on Y700 2nd gen(iirc) and 165hz on Y700 2025.

I'm not sure if your problem is the same I'm facing as well on multiple devices(I have a Y700 2025, but also on other devices). Currently known effective fix is disconnect your physical monitor physically (pull the cable off), but that's obviously not ideal.

[ClassicOldSong]

Actually with virtual display nothing needs to be "synced", turning it on might reduce some clock issues.

All virtual displays should behave the same, they're fundamentally the same so switching solutions won't help anything.

M$ isn't open source in their kernel so bugs like this can be very very hard to locate. Their primary purpose for the VDD API isn't likely meant to be used for high refresh rate game streaming so they might not even care about these frame drop problems.

[what9000]

Hm, interesting. I'll give it a shot with vsync on and see if it behaves better. It'd be hilarious if this whole issue stemmed from one Nvidia control panel toggle.

[what9000]

It fixed it. It was vsync... Man, all that work and it was one toggle. Thank you for the troubleshooting support! Interesting that vsync off is ideal for physical dummy plugs and vsync on works for virtual displays.

Edit: it does indeed stop the framerate dips, but there is occasionally horrible judder from vsync being on. Pyrrhic victory, hah.

[ClassicOldSong]

Due to physical reasons, not all the clocks are exactly the same speed. It varies between devices so eventually they'll misalign more than one frame, and that'll cause judder. Physical display can sync with your GPU wired, but wirelessly they can't.

But I noticed most judder/framerate issues come from 30series cards, I'm using 4080S and it's fine to me.

50series has announced and maybe it's time to upgrade 😜

[ClassicOldSong]

In case, here's my settings:

Low Latency: Off
VSync: Fast
Frame Limit: Off

[what9000]

I was messing with this a bit more, and can add cpu power management to the list of settings with no effect ( setting minimum power state to 100%). vsync: fast locks the frame rate, but it never fully hits 144hz. maybe a few hz below it. Would using the new WGC API have any effect?

[what9000]

I think that actually isolated it. Frame rate limiter in NVCP off, vsync in NVCP off, RTSS running in background with frame limiter (async) selected, and 'enable passive waiting' deselected. The frame pacing is rougher than NVCP frame limiter, but it does lock to the specified frame cap without slowdowns. I wonder what RTSS is doing that the Nvidia control panel isn't...

[ClassicOldSong]

SudoVDA-with-sleep.zip

Can you try this version of SudoVDA? I wonder if that makes any difference since my computer always do things right...

Played Protal Revloution for an hour and I don't think there're any difference in microstutter than streaming the physical monitor, no matter what framerate and device I stream to.

[ClassicOldSong]

SudoVDA-faster-poll.zip

And this version

Please report back If there're any differences

[what9000]

So I tried both versions of SudoVDA, both still getting slowdowns. I fired up testufo's frameskipping test, and amusingly it -never- crashes. So it seems in desktop mode, it will sit all day at 143-144fps, 144hz. If I use a game in fullscreen or windowed fullscreen, I will crash to ~90fps after maybe 30 seconds of playing. I also tried WGC, it also experiences the slowdown but does not report it at all in artemis' performance stats overlay. So far the only thing that seems to prevent the framerate crash is RTSS with async frame limiter and disabling passive waiting (but with a noticeable decrease in frame smoothness vs nvcp's solution)

[ClassicOldSong]

Others say RTSS does the same thing as nvcp, and they have smooth experience with it. Maybe disabled vsync then limit framerate with rtss?