Windows 10: High Latency and stuttering during network use

Hey everyone,

I've been having the following issue after one of the many windows updates start of 2021, I only noticed it appearing more and more around end of January.


Issue: Incredibly high latency in apps, games or just windows itself. No audio cracks present yet. Mouse movement is delayed, dragging windows and moving them around is extremely slow and laggy. Game performance also drops from 380-400fps down to 5-10fps.

When did it start: End of January or start of February.

Is there a pattern: Yes and no. It seems to be triggered by internet usage over a LAN connection. I successfully reproduced it by opening a lot of browser tabs on Youtube or just letting Steam download a game. Sometimes triggered even by opening Discord. I can't always reproduce it though, its completely random far as I can tell, not completely limited by network usage but certainly mostly affected by it.
Task Manager and resource monitor show no anomalies, everything is at the usual usage numbers.

I've been browsing any and every forum / post I could find here and elsewhere for 7 days. I'll list what I've tried below. I'm mainly using LatencyMon to find out who the culprit is, 99% of the time its ndis.sys but there are others I'll explain below.

Build
Speccy Link: http://speccy.piriform.com/results/oNGHcTNjAkd4khqa4xO3gR5

What I've tried:
1. The basics: Updating Mobo-related drivers, reinstalling them, letting Windows choose them, choosing them myself and manually installing it
2. Nvidia: Updated / Clean-installed the latest and drivers from 3 months back with and without Geforce Experience and the Audio driver
3. Windows: Tried the repair, reset with keeping my files, reset without keeping my files and finally a completely wipe of all my drives and reinstalling Windows fresh
4. Updates: All Windows updates up to today have been installed and uninstalled
5. CPU Throttling: Disabled and enabled
6. SFC: Done, sometimes finds something corrupted and fixes it. Other times it doesn't
7. Disk error checks on both the SSD and HDD
8. Changing power plan to performance and back
9. Disabling power management on the network card
10. Disable and enabled high precision event
11. Updates BIOS to the latest version from the manufacturer
12. Installed and uninstalled my Antivirus Kaspersky
13. Using Windows without Internet adapter disabled, cable plugged out just to see if it changes anything

14. Uninstalling the network adapter driver and reinstalling it OFFLINE to prevent Windows from replacing it

If the ethernet cable isn't plugged in and the adapter is disabled, ndis.sys no longer shows up as the culprit but 2-3 others including wdf01000.sys / nvlddmkm.sys / dxgkrnl.sys

This tells me the network driver or adapter isn't the issue, something is faulty and is causing this latency but apparently even Windows isn't sure? For the record they are the EXACT same latency issues regardless of what driver is causing them so I take it the reporting is not exactly accurate.

I somehow managed to make it worse after trying a lot of the above, the spikes didn't cause lag anymore they straight up caused a BSOD saying ndis.sys was to blame because: IRQL_UNEXPECTED_VALUE

I seriously considered faulty hardware until I googled the issue for a week straight and noticed there are a ton of other people having issues extremely similar to mine, considering its mostly recent too I'm guessing a recent Windows update let us all down, again.

:)

 

High DPC latency causing audio stutters

Quite different hardware but this may have your attention.

Sound artifacts and high DPC latency seemingly related to storport driver can be caused by switching between Cx power saving processor states. My pci-express add-on soundcard works correctly only if C states greater than C1 are disabled:





If you want to give it a try, see your mobo manual:

 

High DPC latency causing audio stutters

This is latency mon while my system is idling:
Attachment 226387

This is latency mon while I've opened chrome&Steam:

 

Audio stuttering/buzzing and storport.sys high dpc latency

I've only had this audio issue for a few weeks already after I did a custom windows 10 install bc of a previous problem. I've also posted twice about this but no one has helped me yet. I'll post the following possible solutions and suggestions that
I've already done to avoid repeated answers

I did: audio troubleshooter, uninstalled then reinstalled audio drivers, disabled audio enhancements and tried different audio quality under the advanced tab.


After more searching online I tried using DPC Latency Checker (and then LatencyMon to be more detailed) since I read that having high dpc latency can cause problems with real time audio among other things. Apparently
storport.sys is the problem? I literally just have basic knowledge about anything regarding this kind of stuff and I don't have any clue on how to fix this so I just hope someone can help me and give me steps by steps suggestions on how I can solve this. my
audio has just been driving me crazy with those stuttering sounds and I don't want it to worsen.

I would also like to know if having
Ricoh SD/MMC Host Controller and nothing else aside from that, under
IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, is okay and won't cause problems?

please, I hope someone can help and answer this time around!