HWiNFO Causing Significant Input Lag on Wacom Intuos Pro for Specific Software

[Vekkar]

Hello, I recently purchased HWiNFO and I use it to send data in sensor mode to my Elgato Streamdeck so I can monitor drives and other system parameters. I am a full-time professional animator/artist and I do much of my work Clip Studio Paint EX and Toon Boom Harmony Premium 21/Storyboard Pro 20 with a Wacom Intuos Pro Large pen tablet. When HWiNFO and Clip Studio Paint EX are running at the same time, there is a noticeable slowdown of the Wacom Intuos input where it does not track as quickly as it should leading to extremely choppy input. The second I close HWiNFO the Intuos input is back to full speed with no issues.

I have tried the following to remedy this:

A.) Disabled all unnecessary sensor monitoring ( first I tried disabling ALL sensors which had no noticeable difference ).

B.) Viewed the polling time of each remaining sensor to see if there were any issues remaining, none were found to be the issue or taking up too much time.

C.) Adjusting polling times in main settings, minimum of 50 ms and maximum have been tried with no noticeable effect on the tablet input speed/tracking.

D.) Tried HWiNFO enabled with Toon Boom Harmony/Storyboard Pro, Affinity Designer, etc, and other art software but it is only Clip Studio Paint EX and HWiNFO that is causing an issue with my tablet input. The other software suites work fine with or without HWiNFO running.

E.) Closed every other background/tray app and other software to see if there might have been another interaction, but it is only just HWiNFO and Clip Studio Paint EX causing the main issue.



Other than what I have done currently, what else could I look at doing other than just closing the HWiNFO app every time I need to work? I paid for it so I could integrate it with my Streamdeck and use it with my current workflow. I just didn't realize it would hinder my hardware's ability to properly work.

Debug File

 

[Martin]

I don't see anything in the Debug File that could be causing such lags.
So even if you set the Global Polling Period to something like 30000 ms, the lag will happen constantly with higher frequency than every 30 seconds?

 

[Vekkar]

I don't see anything in the Debug File that could be causing such lags.
So even if you set the Global Polling Period to something like 30000 ms, the lag will happen constantly with higher frequency than every 30 seconds?

Thank you for the reply!

So, I just tried 30,000 ms and I noticed that it performs significantly better which is odd because previously I tried a massively large number for the global polling period and that did not work yet this does. With it set at 30,000 ms the tablet acts normally as if I turned HWiNFO off so that's good enough. It is however easily reproducible because once I knock it back down to the 2,000 ms it starts to become choppy. I can even count the 2-second intervals out loud and each time on 2 it interrupts the tablet.

There doesn't seem to be any downside to using the extended polling period, other than the readout of the data not being as frequent for the charts, so I'll keep an eye on it. If using the 30-second interval is what is necessary that is fine, I just was curious about what may be causing the issue for this setup.

 

[Martin]

OK, so that means it must be caused by reading of some sensor. Please try to disable sensors one by one by hitting the Del key over their heading (make sure you disable the sensor heading/title) and let me know which one is causing this (disabling it doesn't cause the lag).

 

[Vekkar]

OK, so that means it must be caused by reading of some sensor. Please try to disable sensors one by one by hitting the Del key over their heading (make sure you disable the sensor heading/title) and let me know which one is causing this (disabling it doesn't cause the lag).

So, I did each one individually and it yielded no noticeable improvements and went as far as disabling ALL sensors on each heading. Here is what I found out.

With the 30,000 ms, it acts normal whether all sensors are on or off.

With the default 2,000 ms and all sensors off, there is still input lag present, the same as if they were on making me think this is something outside of the sensors because once again if I turn off HWiNFO everything snaps back to full speed.

Not sure if my problem may be related to a separate setting elsewhere inside HWiNFO.

 

[Martin]

Well, this is quite weird.. We'll need to do more tests to pinpoint what exactly is causing this.
Try other different polling periods like 5000, 10000 ms how it will behave.
Try to disable Sensors-only mode (in cause you have it enabled) and launch HWiNFO without sensors. Does the lag happen when the Summary window is active? If yes, you might try to close the Summary and leave just the main window to see if it still lags.

 

[Vekkar]

Well, this is quite weird.. We'll need to do more tests to pinpoint what exactly is causing this.
Try other different polling periods like 5000, 10000 ms how it will behave.
Try to disable Sensors-only mode (in cause you have it enabled) and launch HWiNFO without sensors. Does the lag happen when the Summary window is active? If yes, you might try to close the Summary and leave just the main window to see if it still lags.

I do normally operate in "sensors-only" mode to send the data to my Stream Deck through the Stream Deck plugin so all previous posts by me the testing was performed in "Sensors-Only" mode. However, for the purpose of troubleshooting, I closed the Stream Deck software while performing all my tests with HWiNFO, the Wacom Intuos Pro tablet, and Clip Studio Paint EX. So that should not interfere with results.

I set the global polling period back to 2,000 ms to easily identify if the issue was gone or not as a baseline.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Test A:

Conditions: Launching HWiNFO in "Summary-Only" mode.

Results: Only the summary window is active. No input lag issue occurs. The program and my tablet work perfectly.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Test B:

Conditions: Launching HWiNFO normally with both "Sensors-Only" and "Summary-Only" unchecked. So the summary window is active along with the sensor status window. 2,000 ms default global polling period set.

Results: Input lag returns every 2 seconds.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Test C:

Conditions: Launching HWiNFO normally with both "Sensors-Only" and "Summary-Only" unchecked. 5,000 ms global polling period set.

Results: Input lag occurs every 5 seconds.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Test D:

Conditions: Launching HWiNFO normally with both "Sensors-Only" and "Summary-Only" unchecked. 10,000 ms global polling period set.

Results: Input lag occurs every 10 seconds.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Test E:

Conditions: Launching HWiNFO normally with both "Sensors-Only" and "Summary-Only" unchecked. 30,000 ms global polling period set.

Results: Input lag occurs every 30 seconds.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm not sure what else I can test or change other than just setting the global polling extremely high which is not ideal.

 

[Martin]

Thanks for the extensive test results!
Please try the following: Enable Sensors-only mode again, 2000 ms polling period and Debug Mode as well. Then disable monitoring of all sensors and let it run for a couple of seconds, then close.
Please attach the resulting DBG file so I can analyze it.

 

[Vekkar]

Thanks for the extensive test results!
Please try the following: Enable Sensors-only mode again, 2000 ms polling period and Debug Mode as well. Then disable monitoring of all sensors and let it run for a couple of seconds, then close.
Please attach the resulting DBG file so I can analyze it.

I appreciate your persistence!

Here is the debug file attached. I did exactly what you recommended and went to "sensors-only" mode with 2,000 ms default in debug mode and then disabled all monitoring with it running for a few seconds before closing the program.

 

[Martin]

Thanks for the results.
With this last configuration, HWiNFO is actually doing less polling than in the Summary-only mode (without sensors opened) and the last DBG file confirms it.
In this mode it polls the CPU only and in Summary-only mode it does the same CPU polling plus GPU polling as well.
However per your earlier observations in this mode the lag is present and in Summary-only it isn't. This is quite weird and doesn't make much sense to me.
I'm starting to believe the problem isn't related to polling of sensors at all and it's rather something else. You said the issue happen only when Clip Studio Paint EX is running as well. Perhaps there's some kind of race condition between both applications? Try to do a complete Reset Preferences in HWiNFO if that will change something.

 

[Vekkar]

Thanks for the results.
With this last configuration, HWiNFO is actually doing less polling than in the Summary-only mode (without sensors opened) and the last DBG file confirms it.
In this mode it polls the CPU only and in Summary-only mode it does the same CPU polling plus GPU polling as well.
However per your earlier observations in this mode the lag is present and in Summary-only it isn't. This is quite weird and doesn't make much sense to me.
I'm starting to believe the problem isn't related to polling of sensors at all and it's rather something else. You said the issue happen only when Clip Studio Paint EX is running as well. Perhaps there's some kind of race condition between both applications? Try to do a complete Reset Preferences in HWiNFO if that will change something.

That's what I was thinking in my initial post as the first thing I did was to disable all sensors and I saw that the issue still persisted.

I reset preferences and the issue still exists, unfortunately. I also tried to uninstall, reboot, reinstall, and still the same issue.

I decided to take a look and sample my memory with both programs running to find any bottlenecks with each program and I generated these call graphs.

HWiNFO data:

Luke.png
Call Graph 1.png
Call Graph 2.png

Clip Studio Paint Data:

CSP Luke.png
CSP Luke 2.png


Not sure if they help.

 

[Martin]

Please try the following to see if it will make any difference:
- Disable Shared Memory Support
- Hide all sensors

 

[Vekkar]

Please try the following to see if it will make any difference:
- Disable Shared Memory Support
- Hide all sensors

Sadly no change, the issue is still present while running. I can learn to live with just turning off HWiNFO when working in Clip Studio Paint EX. I appreciate all your help!

This must be something that the Japanese developers have done differently with their software as opposed to other development teams. No other graphics software does this which really makes me curious about what they're doing behind the scenes.

 

[Martin]

Yes, it's really strange and I'm wondering about that too.

 

[Vekkar]

Yes, it's really strange and I'm wondering about that too.

Wanted to update:

I recently tried an older version and I noticed that the issue is not present on older versions of the software. Not sure what is causing it in the newer revisions of HWiNFO.

Downgrading to an older version of HWiNFO fixed the issue for me.

 

[Martin]

What's the latest version that doesn't have this issue?

 

[Vekkar]

What's the latest version that doesn't have this issue?

So, I just did a ton of installs from the first 64-bit version I could find until the latest. This is what I found out.

The hitching/input lag is actually still there even in the earliest versions! It's just way less noticeable!


It goes something like this to save time:

HWiNFO Version 3.80 and below = Did not test due to only being 32-bit.

HWiNFO Version 3.82 - Version 6.24 = Very little hitching/input lag, noticeable only if I really slow things down to see it.

HWiNFO Version 6.26 - Version 6.28 = Interrmittently bad input lag/hitching, 60% of the time it works fine then every now and then it will have a bad lag spike.

HWiNFO Version 6.30 - Version 7.24 = All exhibit the pronounced input lag that caused me to originally start this forum post. Very noticeable hard input lag that occurs at whatever interval the global polling period is currently set at. Makes the experience impossible to work with when running.

Also, I noticed the uninstaller for older versions, 3.82 - 6.00 were able to fully remove everything in the install folder including the INI while any version after 6.00 would leave the INI which I made sure to delete after each uninstall to make sure it was fresh for the next install revision.

Might just go back to the latest revision and just keep it off as I stated before when working then flick it back on when not using the graphics tools and my tablet.

Funnily enough, my mouse works without lag or hitching in these programs with HWiNFO running its just the Wacom tablet that skips when HWiNFO is running with Clip Studio Paint. The tablet works fine with HWiNFO and any other software running.

I also tried portable versions and those made no difference.

Odd stuff.