Framerate does not match refresh rate. Games and video choppy

I’ve had this issue in the past but at one point it seemed to go away. It’s back again so I decided to issue another bug report.

In all driver versions past 343.36 when playing games or watching accelerated video the playback is very choppy. Running glxgears shows:

glxgears
Running synchronized to the vertical refresh. The framerate should be
approximately the same as the monitor refresh rate.
272 frames in 5.0 seconds = 54.311 FPS
272 frames in 5.0 seconds = 54.384 FPS
271 frames in 5.0 seconds = 54.183 FPS

(this happens regardless of the sync to vblank option)

Drivers 343.36 and lower don’t have this issue (or only very minor). Any driver newer is unusable for video or games. No amount of reinstalling drivers, changing kernel versions or even distros (I tried both Mint and vanilla Ubuntu) helped.

Let me know if you need more info!

Neil

nvidia-bug-report.log.gz (221 KB)

Hello,

one thing concerns me in your log file, although I’m not personally qualified to say much about it:

[ 151.052] (–) NVIDIA(GPU-0):
[ 151.651] (–) NVIDIA(GPU-0): Samsung SyncMaster (DFP-0): connected
[ 151.651] (–) NVIDIA(GPU-0): Samsung SyncMaster (DFP-0): Internal TMDS
[ 151.651] (–) NVIDIA(GPU-0): Samsung SyncMaster (DFP-0): 330.0 MHz maximum pixel clock
[ 151.651] (–) NVIDIA(GPU-0):
[ 151.682] (–) NVIDIA(GPU-0): Samsung SyncMaster (DFP-0): connected
[ 151.682] (–) NVIDIA(GPU-0): Samsung SyncMaster (DFP-0): Internal TMDS
[ 151.682] (–) NVIDIA(GPU-0): Samsung SyncMaster (DFP-0): 330.0 MHz maximum pixel clock
[ 151.682] (–) NVIDIA(GPU-0):
[ 152.281] (–) NVIDIA(GPU-0): Samsung SyncMaster (DFP-0): connected
[ 152.281] (–) NVIDIA(GPU-0): Samsung SyncMaster (DFP-0): Internal TMDS
[ 152.281] (–) NVIDIA(GPU-0): Samsung SyncMaster (DFP-0): 330.0 MHz maximum pixel clock
[ 152.281] (–) NVIDIA(GPU-0):
[ 152.312] (–) NVIDIA(GPU-0): Samsung SyncMaster (DFP-0): connected
[ 152.312] (–) NVIDIA(GPU-0): Samsung SyncMaster (DFP-0): Internal TMDS
[ 152.312] (–) NVIDIA(GPU-0): Samsung SyncMaster (DFP-0): 330.0 MHz maximum pixel clock
[ 152.312] (–) NVIDIA(GPU-0):

See the timestamps? Your monitor is apparently seen by the driver as hotplugging itself several times a second. No doubt this is what causes your issues. This may well be a driver bug, but it would be good to test with another monitor too.

I was wondering about that as well. The one item I forgot to mention is this only happens with the driver from Nvidia. If Nouveau is used I don’t see this problem at all.

I’ll give a different monitor a shot later this evening as well.

Thank you!

Update…

It does in fact seem to be monitor related! I switched to an old Acer AL2216W and the playback is flawless. Attached is a bug report with this monitor attached while running glxgears.

All this being said, why do drivers before 343.36 and the nouveau drivers work?

Neil
nvidia-bug-report.log.gz (216 KB)