Low 2d Direct 2d score with GTX 970/4790k

[maxbrokeaway]

Hi, I'm having a recent issue that is affecting my Direct 2D score with passmark on my GTX 970.

It seems every single test I am running, from CPU to Hard drive, is right where it should be EXCEPT the Direct 2D test (The one with the spinning arrows and such).

I used to get between 30 and 50 fps on the first few tests I ran after installing my 970.

Here's where it gets weird:
I haven't ran any tests in a month or so, so last night I decided to test again for fun. I noticed that the Direct 2D portion ran much slower, between 11 and 18 fps. And also the arrows stayed fuzzy during the zoom in and took a while to render them sharper.

I ran this test several times and noticed that about one out of every 5 tests would behave like it used to, between 30 and 50 fps, but the rest were between 11 and 18, which is slower than Intel HD 4000. Not good.

SO I tried playing with a few settings like power options and checking my cpu speed on CPU-Z to make sure it was running at full clock speed, which it was. Check temps, those are super good (I have a very good cooling system for my PC). My CPU and GPU are not overclocked, I just have XMP profiles turned on for my RAM so the timings are at factory settings and all CPU cores run at the same frequency of 4.4Ghz under the windows high performance setting.

I can't figure out what's going on. Was there a recent windows update that affects this kind of thing? Are the new nvidia drivers for the 970 the problem? Any one else experiencing this phenomena?

Thanks in advance for any and all feedback.

[orioon]

In the beginnings, there were a lot of issues due to various driver bugs.
Some of them were insane bottlenecks, so this should actually improve!

Do you still remember which driver you used for the card back then?
The additional updates from Windows could also be the culprit, they are affecting GDI redering a lot afaik.

Good article from 2010 describing the issues:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...-gdi,2539.html

[maxbrokeaway]

In the beginnings, there were a lot of issues due to various driver bugs.
Some of them were insane bottlenecks, so this should actually improve!

Do you still remember which driver you used for the card back then?
The additional updates from Windows could also be the culprit, they are affecting GDI redering a lot afaik.

Good article from 2010 describing the issues:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...-gdi,2539.html

Yeah, It was about 2 revisions ago. So 344.11 I believe was what I was using. I dont really want to roll back drivers though.

Also I'm using Windows 8.1 x64

[csdarknightcs]

Try updating to the current 347.09

[NoelC]

Hi, I'm having a recent issue that is affecting my Direct 2D score with passmark on my GTX 970.

It seems every single test I am running, from CPU to Hard drive, is right where it should be EXCEPT the Direct 2D test (The one with the spinning arrows and such).

I used to get between 30 and 50 fps on the first few tests I ran after installing my 970.

Here's where it gets weird:
I haven't ran any tests in a month or so, so last night I decided to test again for fun. I noticed that the Direct 2D portion ran much slower, between 11 and 18 fps. And also the arrows stayed fuzzy during the zoom in and took a while to render them sharper.

I have been wondering about this EXACT SAME problem since November of last year.

I believe a Windows 8.1 Update destroyed Direct2D performance.

As I have an ATI card, it's clear it's not related to specific display drivers or even to the brand of graphics card.

I do Passmark benchmarking regularly - I have for years - in order to spot problems or trends, so I can pinpoint exactly when this slowdown happened. Note the screen grab below.

The only place it gets a little odd for me: After a Windows Update in Mid February, performance of the Direct 2D benchmark seem to mostly return, but then it went back to dismal levels after the very next update.



-Noel

[David (PassMark)]

Interesting. We weren't aware of any issue, but Noel looks like he has been tracking it much more carefully than we have. Easy to believe that some O/S patch or driver changes effects the performance however.

[NoelC]

I have a hunch the performance will magically be restored in Win 10.

-Noel

[David (PassMark)]

We had another customer complain of similar behaviour in the Direct2D last week and did a bit more investigation.

What we found that the Direct2D benchmark results jumped between a slow and fast result (like in the chart posted above). Our test was on a Intel GPU, so it isn't something that is in the video card device drivers, as the post above was a AMD GPU.

What we saw was that that you didn't need a patch update to observe the fast / slow behaviour. You could run the test 100 times and then maybe 5 times in 100, you would get a fast result. The other 95 runs would give a slow result. We were unable to find a pattern or trigger condition that would to force a fast result. While there is probably some deeper cause, it superficially at least seems random.

We also tested on Win10 and Win7 (but with different hardware) but didn't see this behaviour. The Direct2D results were very consistent on Win10 and Win7.

Our theory at the moment is that there was a Win8 operating system patch that broke Direct2D some time back and Microsoft never noticed.

[pal2002]

Hi, wanted to chime in on this after finding this thread via google.

Just upgraded from windows 7 (fully patched SP1) to windows 10 and all the passmark scores remained more or less constant EXCEPT direct2d that took a nosedive (31 -> 17) and that took the total 2d graphics score from 1000+ down to 790. This is on an overclocked GTX 960.

I never installed windows 8 on this machine but your hypothesis seem right - and whatever update that caused this got carried to windows 10 as well.

http://www.passmark.com/baselines/V8...id=44578459786 <-score on windows 7

[Xanedon]

Just to chime in, I originally joined into the forum researching the confusingly low 2D scores on my system as well. I just did a new build out for windows 10 and everything is looking swimmingly... except for 2D.

My baseline from this morning:
http://www.passmark.com/baselines/V8...id=45619151573

I'll have to dig into it a bit more and see if its consistent with a few more runs, but definitely something that when you look at the averages for the 980 Ti I would expect it to be a bit higher.

[David (PassMark)]

PerformanceTest executes the same 2D test, with the same code, on all operating systems. So really any change in performance has to be due to the O/S or the video card drivers (assuming you haven't changed the hardware).

Given that it happens on cards from Intel, nVidia and AMD, I think the only conclusion is a change in the operating system caused the problem. Microsoft either accidentally broke something and hasn't noticed, or maybe deliberately accepted lower performance as a trade off to enable some other feature (e.g. multiple desktops in Win10).

I've made some effort to contact Microsoft, but no response as yet.

[Xanedon]

Hmm, According to Firefox Direct2D is Blocked for the graphics driver version.


went to about:support in firefox down under graphics.



It appears the D2D is disabled on the latest driver versions.

[David (PassMark)]

I don't think so. I think you are interpreting the information from Firefox incorrectly. I think this means that Firefox decided that Direct2D didn't work so well on your machine (or they haven't tested it yet) and so they didn't use it from Firefox. I don't think this say anything about the availability of Direct2D in the O/S.

[David (PassMark)]

Microsoft got back to us & confirmed it is an operating system bug.

This is the detail from Microsoft.

"My team has investigated your report, and we’ve uncovered an issue that explains the regression. In particular, we found that one particular optimization from an older Direct2D geometry rendering code path had not been included in a newer code path. As users update to Windows 10, their graphics drivers are being updated as well. These newer graphics drivers typically use the newer code path, which, as mentioned, lacks that one particular optimization. So even though many scenarios see improved 2D rendering performance with the new drivers, a few scenarios are showing performance regressions, as your report pointed out.

With the cause of the problem in hand, our team is actively evaluating our options for closing this gap."

[pal2002]

Microsoft got back to us & confirmed it is an operating system bug.

This is the detail from Microsoft.

"My team has investigated your report, and we’ve uncovered an issue that explains the regression. In particular, we found that one particular optimization from an older Direct2D geometry rendering code path had not been included in a newer code path. As users update to Windows 10, their graphics drivers are being updated as well. These newer graphics drivers typically use the newer code path, which, as mentioned, lacks that one particular optimization. So even though many scenarios see improved 2D rendering performance with the new drivers, a few scenarios are showing performance regressions, as your report pointed out.

With the cause of the problem in hand, our team is actively evaluating our options for closing this gap."

Yay looks like this is finally getting fixed.

I'm curious though as to what magical contact at Microsoft did you have. My typical experience of asking for support on MS forums amount to wonderfully useful solutions such as "restart your computer" and "try updating your drivers"