iCUE 3.19 System Interrupts High CPU Usage

Been having the same issues as a lot of people on here which started after I updated to the lastest version of icue last friday night.

Games were unplayable due to the serious framerate drops, icue was running in the background and not minimized.

Thankfully 3.18 has fixed my problems, but a lot of time was wasted over the weekend trying to figure out what was the cause of the problem, it nearly got to the point where I was going to rma m y RTX2070 Super which is not even a month old to drop from around 124 frames per second to 47 is not good news in my book at all.

Sorry to see that some of you guys are seeing some issues with 3.19. Since this version just dropped last Friday, we didn't get a chance to provide you guys a response right away due to labor day weekend.

 

@momorious, Thank you for sharing your experience with 3.19, it's unfortunate that it's a bad one rather than a good one. Pulling down the public version is not as simple as you think though, we need to gather more data then decide if pulling 3.19 down is warranted or not.

 

Regarding the high CPU usage on a single core, that is something we have seen before so I'll inform the software team for them to re-evaluate and figure out a solution. As for the frame rate drops, I'm wondering if this is only happening when you have iCUE running in the background vs having it minimized.

 

@Dicehunter, You know better than that. This might have been a slight oversight on our part, but saying that QA is our customer is a bit of a stretch.

FPS drops happen whether its minimized or not. If 3.19 is running whatsoever, you get a performance tank.

Sorry to see that some of you guys are seeing some issues with 3.19. Since this version just dropped last Friday, we didn't get a chance to provide you guys a response right away due to labor day weekend.

 

@momorious, Thank you for sharing your experience with 3.19, it's unfortunate that it's a bad one rather than a good one. Pulling down the public version is not as simple as you think though, we need to gather more data then decide if pulling 3.19 down is warranted or not.

 

Regarding the high CPU usage on a single core, that is something we have seen before so I'll inform the software team for them to re-evaluate and figure out a solution. As for the frame rate drops, I'm wondering if this is only happening when you have iCUE running in the background vs having it minimized.

 

@Dicehunter, You know better than that. This might have been a slight oversight on our part, but saying that QA is our customer is a bit of a stretch.

In my case, the high CPU usage on a single core is not caused by a high software usage, such as a loop, but hardware interrupts. When iCUE starts, I see the number of hardware interrupts go high during the device detection phase. It seems like iCUE is polling devices and one of them is starting to do these hardware interrupts, not the iCUE.exe process itself. Some were pointing towards RGB RAM.

I've made screenshots of the usage with 3.18 and 3.19 for comparison. We can see at the bottom the big difference in interrupt delta. Interrupts at 6% may not represent a lot, but 100% /12 cores = 8% or 75% of core 0 on my PC.

The problem is that drivers, such as graphics card, are affected by the latency these interrupts are causing, hence the FPS drop in games.

Also, when I was closing iCUE and stopping Corsair service, the interrupts would not drop until a reboot. I disabled the service and automatic startup of iCUE and i didn't have any problem until I started iCUE manually.

At least that's my understanding...

See screenshots in post: https://forum.corsair.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1016165&postcount=18

@Dicehunter, You know better than that. This might have been a slight oversight on our part, but saying that QA is our customer is a bit of a stretch.

You personally know how much I love Corsair products, And everything in my rig and on my desk being Corsair, You yourself having helped me a lot with RMA/warranty issues over the years, Of which I am very grateful, But on the software side it's been slipping for a very long time now :(:

Same issues here as the others with 3.19. With iCue running I have an unplayable computer (framerates jump all over the place and never consistently). When I uninstalled 3.19 everything went back to normal.

Latencymon blames the nvidia driver, but I've futzed with many different versions to no success. I finally resorted to loading a system image from the first of the month just to get rid of all the nasty.

I'd be happy to provide a dxdiag or any other log to whoever needs it on the Corsair side.

Quick specs for reference:

Windows 10 Pro Build 18970

Gigabyte Z370 Aorus Gaming 7 mobo

i7 8700k @ 4.7 Ghz w/ Corsair H115i Pro

EVGA Geforce RTX 2080 Ti XC Ultra

32GB (4x8) Corsair Vengeance RGP Pro @ 3200

EDIT: THIS IS UNRELATED TO THE ISSUE (just similar symptoms at a glance, i.e. single core at 100% utilisation)

Leaving it here so replies below aren't confusing.

Perhaps unrelated but it looks like the Windows 10 1903 patch KB4512941 is causing a similar issue. I can't find many sources but here you go.

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-investigating-bug-causing-high-cpu-usage-windows-10-update-kb4512941

Just adding this in case some people are seeing this and thinking it's iCue when it's not. Or in case this is making identification/diagnosis more difficult in general. This could also indicate a Windows 10 related root cause, also affecting iCue - but that is 100% speculation.

Same issues here as the others with 3.19. With iCue running I have an unplayable computer (framerates jump all over the place and never consistently). When I uninstalled 3.19 everything went back to normal.

 

Latencymon blames the nvidia driver, but I've futzed with many different versions to no success. I finally resorted to loading a system image from the first of the month just to get rid of all the nasty.

 

I'd be happy to provide a dxdiag or any other log to whoever needs it on the Corsair side.

 

Quick specs for reference:

Windows 10 Pro Build 18970

Gigabyte Z370 Aorus Gaming 7 mobo

i7 8700k @ 4.7 Ghz w/ Corsair H115i Pro

EVGA Geforce RTX 2080 Ti XC Ultra

32GB (4x8) Corsair Vengeance RGP Pro @ 3200

Latency Monitor will show you drivers that are taking a long time for execution. This is not always the driver to blame.

Currently you are seeing nvidia driver causing latency, but in fact hardware interrupts are causing that latency to other drivers and since the video card is frequently used, you are seeing more latency on the nvidia driver.

I had the same observation and I did a huge file transfer over my gigabit network adapter and the driver "to blame" became NDIS.

Your Nvidia driver is fine. Issue goes away with iCUE 3.18.

Hardware interrupts are very high priority and interrupt the CPU execution thus causing those delays and apparent lag.

Perhaps unrelated but it looks like the Windows 10 1903 patch KB4512941 is causing a similar issue. I can't find many sources but here you go.

 

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-investigating-bug-causing-high-cpu-usage-windows-10-update-kb4512941

 

Just adding this in case some people are seeing this and thinking it's iCue when it's not. Or in case this is making identification/diagnosis more difficult in general. This could also indicate a Windows 10 related root cause, also affecting iCue - but that is 100% speculation.

I didn’t have update KB4512941 installed and it seems to be Cortana or search processes with high CPU usage not hardware interrupts.

Perhaps unrelated but it looks like the Windows 10 1903 patch KB4512941 is causing a similar issue. I can't find many sources but here you go.

 

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-investigating-bug-causing-high-cpu-usage-windows-10-update-kb4512941

 

Just adding this in case some people are seeing this and thinking it's iCue when it's not. Or in case this is making identification/diagnosis more difficult in general. This could also indicate a Windows 10 related root cause, also affecting iCue - but that is 100% speculation.

It's unrelated, and that update only affects people who went out of their way to disable cortana via registry/group policy edits.

In our case, it is 100% iCUE fault here as it is very reproducible. If it's running in the background then performance will tank. If it's closed then it will not.

I noticed the main website now has 3.12.118 as the version download. Should those of us that are using 3.18 roll all the way back to 3.12?

Still shows v3.19.120 for me

No, find 3.18.77 somewhere. There are some substantial differences between where we are now and 3.12.

Unfortunately it seems all of the "legit" download sites only have 3.19 available. Since we're getting no help from Corsair here I just uninstalled the software and went back to LINK to control the water cooler and will just do without iCue until there is a resolution.

Unfortunately it seems all of the "legit" download sites only have 3.19 available. Since we're getting no help from Corsair here I just uninstalled the software and went back to LINK to control the water cooler and will just do without iCue until there is a resolution.

well, seems you have to wait AT LEAST for 3.20 at the end of september then as it doesnt look like they will release a hotfix. Maybe even til Christmas or Easter or next summer....

Unfortunately it seems all of the "legit" download sites only have 3.19 available. Since we're getting no help from Corsair here I just uninstalled the software and went back to LINK to control the water cooler and will just do without iCue until there is a resolution.

All previous versions are available to download from Corsair's website. The links are not in the download section.

Just replace the version number in the URL:

3.19.120: http://downloads.corsair.com/Files/CUE/iCUESetup_3.19.120_release.msi

3.18.77: http://downloads.corsair.com/Files/CUE/iCUESetup_3.18.77_release.msi

3.17.97: http://downloads.corsair.com/Files/CUE/iCUESetup_3.17.94_release.msi

I don't know if it's related, but I noticed that one of my CPU core was running close to 100% and it was hardware interrupts, not a process.

 

I ran Latency Monitor and it was showing high latency with NVIDIA driver and HD audio.

 

I tried updating all drivers, downgrading, even BIOS update/downgrade.

 

I didn't think it could be iCUE, but I uninstalled it, rebooted and no more hardware interrupts taking one core of my CPU.

 

Now Latmon no longer shows latency issue with Nvidia drivers and audio.

Same for me. I also ran Latency Monitor. As a last ditch effort I uninstalled icue to see if it would help and the system interrupts returned to normal. Went back to 3.16.56 and all`s well.

Quick update guys.First off, I'd like to thank you for sharing all your feedback on this version of iCUE. I've gathered all the necessary information that you guys have provided and shared them with James and our software team. Again, I apologize if this new version has caused some inconvenience to some of you guys.

 

I've been told that they were able to reproduce the FPS drop and found the root cause. We've come up with a solution and is currently in the process of implementing on the next update. Release date is still tbd, but since we've made it top priority, my guess will be a lot sooner than we had it planned out. I'll keep you guys posted as I get more info.

Thanks Greybeard. On the one hand it's good to know you're making progress. On the other hand, it's surprising this sort of issue can make it through internal and beta testing before wider release.

Quick update guys.First off, I'd like to thank you for sharing all your feedback on this version of iCUE. I've gathered all the necessary information that you guys have provided and shared them with James and our software team. Again, I apologize if this new version has caused some inconvenience to some of you guys.

 

I've been told that they were able to reproduce the FPS drop and found the root cause. We've come up with a solution and is currently in the process of implementing on the next update. Release date is still tbd, but since we've made it top priority, my guess will be a lot sooner than we had it planned out. I'll keep you guys posted as I get more info.

Thank you for the update :)