OpenGL Performance Issue on Windows 10 since Driver 355.60

Hi,

Our multi-viewed stage lighting application can create and delete one or more OpenGL views depending on our users workflow. On Windows 10, our users started to experience a terrible performance issue since driver 355.60 was released.

The performance issue is the OpenGL view runs at a reasonable frame rate for a while. Then, something will trigger a slowdown causing frame rate to be approximately 1-2 FPS. The slowdown will remain even the OpenGL view/context is deleted and another new OpenGL view/context is created. The only way to get back to the reasonable frame rate is to close our application and launch it again.

From our investigation, the trigger seems to be our application consumed a certain huge amount of video memory. (due to multiple OpenGL views, or just lots of different spot lights are on (>500) at a particular moment). It seems if the video memory consumption reached a certain threshold, which is hardware dependent, then the application will be flagged to run much slower forever, even after we free up the OpenGL resources and memory. or even the OpenGL view/context is deleted and a new OpenGL view/context is created. The slowdown is particularly obvious on rendering to texture operations.

We have suggested to our Windows 10 customers experiencing this issue to temporarily revert back to driver 353.62. This has worked for our users who can and who are willing to revert back to the older driver, but not all our customers are willing to do so as some other application require newer driver versions. This performance issue didn’t exist on driver 353.62 or older. This performance issue is also not observed on Windows 7 machine.

I can understand the performance will be low if too much memory is consumed and paging is happening. However, the performance should get back to normal when the memory consumption gets back down.

Any feedback or suggestions on this issue would be greatly appreciated.