Playback suddenly choppy

Hi
Have many projects ongoing atm, consisting of 3840 and 1920 mp4s and rendered dnx footage - everything has been working well for months until this morning.
Last night I was working with a client on a reasonably simple project, all went well. Then when I went to play the project this morning it won't playback faster than 12 or 13fps. Tried all of my other projects - the same. Slooooow choppy playback.

Booted and rebooted, tried re-caching, but still have choppiness, which is making work impossible.

We've had no power outages, - everything else on the workstation is operating fine.

I'm at a loss, any ideas, quick fixes?

[Peter Chamberlain]

Did windows do an update overnight

UPDATE - FALSE ALARM
Thanks for your quick reply Peter... the workstation is not connected to the internet though.

However I DID plug a device into the line in of the PC this morning - and that must have created some static. When I turned the systeml off, pulled out the mains cord, plugged it all back, rebooted, and guess what... all good again

DVR working like a treat... client now happy again.

Cheers

Not sure this will help, but my playback was choppy until I cleared the chance which had filled up the hard drive.

Yeah this has happened again, and it is soooooooooooo frustrating.

No projects will run faster than 10fps... terribly choppy.
And not the first time this has happened over the last couple of months.

Basically was working fine on a 7 layer multi Fusion timeline, and worked like a breeze at 4PM... came back and loaded up Resolve at 8pm and nothing will play faster than 10fps. I am at my wits end... other programs working well,(Photoshop/Audition etc) but DaVinci is using a lot of CPU power - Task Manager says VERY HIGH - I have changed nothing. Tried restarting the machine - no change - but something about the program is not right - it is continually pulling high power through the CPU even when idle - no spurious Windows processes are happening - I've deleted caches and re rendered, no change... honestly it is so damn frustrating.

Does anybody else have this sort of problem. Workstation is only 18 months old. I am VERY pedantic about keeping the system lean, so only the critical apps on the machine - internet is not connected.

And I have noticed that Resolve stays running now even once I have quit. Has to be terminated in Task Manager

For the record - I reinstalled DVR 17.3.1, for the second time but still made no difference. Playback was so choppy and laggy, even the UI and simply interacting with the Edit Page screen slowed to snail's pace.

I figured it must have been a Windows problem as I noticed that a (sneaky) small build upgrade had occurred yesterday morning, when I reconnected to the internet to record a Skype interview for a health documentary. The connection was only for 40 minutes, but Windows must have managed to complete that download and instal by the time I disconnected from the interview... there was no overt signal to me that this was happening. It was one of the very rare times I connect the workstation to the net.

Anyway, when I went through Windows Events I discovered this had happened, so I rolled back and reinstalled the previous OS build I had. Unfortunately nothing changed, and DVR was still limping along at 10fps, and totally unusable!! Now I was desperate. Could it be hardware that may have died.

To check whether it was a hardware or software problem, I clean booted off my USB SSD System backup, which is about 6 weeks behind my daily status.
I imported current projects backups, and voila, everything running smoothly and perfectly again!

So I now knew it wasn't a hardware problem... it was software, probably DVR. As I could see though, the Resolve that was backed up to my SSD system was 17.2.1. So I decided to retro instal 17.2.1 to my default C drive, and solve the problem. Unfortunately when I booted my default system up, I still had exactly the same problem!! Laggy, unusable.

Well I knew it had to be software! But what/where.
Has anybody twigged what the problem was?

Yep, it's something that I should have tried even BEFORE I reinstalled Resolve - the NVidia GFX Driver.
Did a clean reinstal of that driver, and all was humming away perfectly again. Who would have thought that a GFX driver would spontaneously corrupt while I was away from the machine for a few hours.
Sometimes I just don't get Windows.

Anyway the moral of the story is Bad Drivers are not always on the Roadway.

Windows has a tendency to mess with your drivers. For DR, it should always be a clean install under your command.
Thanks for the detailed report, it might be helpful for others.

[Peter Chamberlain]

Unfortunately it's a common story. Win10 updates disrupt a working system by changing something, often the GPU driver.