Massive Performance Issues - Graphics Driver Related???

This is an extremely frustrating issue I seem to have as a repeat from a few weeks ago. I was running Resolve 17.4.1 fine a couple weeks back, then was running it fine for an hour this morning and suddenly it slowed down to a crawl. Awful stuttering, no smooth playback. Same issue I experienced before and struggled with for days.

I updated to Resolve 17.4.2, latest version now. Experienced the same exact poor performance. I was previously running the latest NVidia studio drivers. Found a random youtube video claiming to fix the issue by switching to game ready drivers, that did nothing. A commenter said to use DDU to completely remove the driver and install a fresh new one.

I tried DDU and it worked, everything playing back perfectly again - I didn't test for more than an hour to see if it would degrade yet. However this was with windows randomly installing version 456 of the game ready driver. I tried updating with a clean install to the latest studio driver again, and had performance issues again.

I repeated the whole DDU process a second time, everything worked great again. Then I tried an upgrade to the latest game ready driver - horrible performance issues again. It seems like simply installing a graphics driver update wrecks my performance for no reason. I also need a version later than 462 to run NVidia Broadcast for the noise reduction feature I use when recording voiceover, so it is extremely irritating to be stuck using the 456 driver and needing to DDU my system again... The process takes time and then involves a restart, and waiting for Windows to recognize my graphics driver is gone, and then more waiting for the new one to start working. Maybe 20-30 minutes each time.

I have no idea what the root cause of this issue might be. If someone knows of a way to run DDU and somehow then get the latest driver running instead of letting Windows grab and older one, maybe that would work?

Download the driver you want to try and save it somewhere you know where to find it.
Use DDU and clear out the old stuff.
Shutdown system and disconnect from internet/network.
Start system back up then install driver you saved earlier.
That should work because windows will not be able to get any other drivers from the net.
Of course reconnect to net. After its all going.
Might be worth a try.

Good Luck

Download the driver you want to try and save it somewhere you know where to find it.
Use DDU and clear out the old stuff.
Shutdown system and disconnect from internet/network.
Start system back up then install driver you saved earlier.
That should work because windows will not be able to get any other drivers from the net.
Of course reconnect to net. After its all going.
Might be worth a try.

Good Luck

I was able to do this process, and with the latest driver everything worked great at first. Then I restarted my PC to ensure the driver was correctly installed and everything would remain stable, and it was back to being a stuttering mess. I really cannot think of what can possibly be the cause of these problems. I can't run DDU every time I want to work on a video project...

Have you checked the health of your Seagate hard drive?

Update: Found what I think is the solution. I called NVidia and they walked me through disabling any nonessential startup services in msconfig. It seems this has fixed the issue for now, even through restarts. However, I did find that opening the NVidia control panel and trying to change color settings there brought the awful behavior back. Resetting everything to default and restarting got it all working again. I'm also now using an outdated version of RTX Voice rather than NVidia Broadcast (which has the latest version of that feature baked in).

Seems like some piece of software on my machine had a background service running that would cause problems, in addition to some inexplicable behavior from NVidia's software (Experience, Broadcast, control panel, all three???)

Also my Seagate hard drive is fine, its only a few months old and SMART check came back fine. I had suspected this as a cause as well but crystal disk mark tests don't show anything unusual, in fact it outperforms my other drive which is a 2TB WD black and should be the same or better.

Don't use any software from Nividia other than the GPU driver.