If you’re experiencing lag spikes and performance slowdowns on your PC, the culprit might not be what you think. Your PC can be perfectly fine in terms of hardware, but if certain drivers or processes are hogging system resources in the background, everything grinds to a halt.
There are plenty of hidden Windows services that hog your CPU and other system resources. To make matters worse, finding these services is often a painstaking process—until you start using this tool.
What LatencyMon actually does
It reveals what’s really causing lag, not just what you think is
LatencyMon is designed to check whether your Windows PC can handle real-time audio and other time-sensitive tasks without dropouts. It was originally built for musicians and audio professionals who need their systems to process audio smoothly. However, since most drivers operate on the same underlying principle, they can also be used to diagnose PC performance.
The tool monitors DPC (Deferred Procedure Call) and ISR (Interrupt Service Routine) execution times. These are high-priority tasks that Windows needs to handle quickly. If a particular driver or process takes too long to execute them, the system can’t keep up, resulting in audio glitches, video stuttering, or even system freezes in extreme cases.
If you’re wondering why you should care about a tool made for audio professionals, here’s the thing: DPC latency doesn’t just affect audio. High latency can cause stuttering in games, lag during video calls, choppy playback on streaming services, and even make your mouse or keyboard feel unresponsive.
Think of it like a busy restaurant kitchen. If one chef (in this case, a driver) takes too long to prepare a dish, the entire service gets backed up, and customers (your applications) start experiencing delays. LatencyMon’s job is to identify which “chef” is causing the delay.
Another great aspect of LatencyMon is that it’s incredibly easy to use. Download the program from the official Resplendence website, install it, and click the Start button. That’s it.
LatencyMon will run for about five to ten minutes while you use your computer normally and will give you a straightforward verdict. If your DPC and ISR execution times are below 2,000 microseconds, your system is fine. Times between 2,000 and 4,000 microseconds are considered doubtful, and anything above 4,000 indicates an issue that needs fixing.
The usual suspects behind high latency
Drivers, background tasks, and other hidden culprits
The most common culprits that LatencyMon identifies are often network, graphics, and USB drivers. Windows’ own kernel processes can sometimes be identified as problematic as well. Network adapters, especially Wi-Fi cards, are notorious for causing latency spikes. Sometimes, simply disabling your Wi-Fi adapter or switching to airplane mode can fix random jitters.
Graphics card drivers, particularly from Nvidia (nvlddmkm.sys), can also cause problems if they’re outdated or corrupted. If you have an AMD card, watch out for amdkmdag.sys or atikmpag.sys showing high latency as well. Intel’s Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework is another frequent offender, especially on laptops, as it deals with power settings and can interfere with real-time processing.
Last but not least, another process that can cause high DPC latency is Intel’s Rapid Storage Technology. Uninstalling the software can dramatically reduce latency spikes in some cases.
How to actually fix what’s slowing you down
Fixing drivers is easier than you think
Once LatencyMon finds the problematic driver, there are several ways to tackle the issue. The first and easiest step is updating your drivers. You can either use the Windows Device Manager or one of the many free driver updaters for Windows to get the job done.
If updating doesn’t work, try disabling any devices you’re not using. Each disabled device is one less potential source of latency. Updating graphics drivers for Windows is also easy, as Nvidia, AMD, and Intel all offer dedicated utilities that deal with driver updates and GPU settings. If updating GPU drivers doesn’t work, doing a clean GPU driver reinstall can do the trick.
For power management issues, try switching your Windows power plan to the highest performance plan available to disable any CPU throttling settings in Windows. You can also tweak BIOS settings to extract more performance out of your CPU and get rid of unwanted latency issues.
It’s not always your hardware’s fault
Even high-end rigs can feel sluggish for dumb reasons
If your PC feels sluggish, audio is crackling, or you’re experiencing random stutters that you can’t explain, LatencyMon should be your first step. It takes less than 10 minutes to run a scan, and requires zero technical knowledge to interpret the results. You get specific, actionable information about what’s wrong with your system.
Most importantly, LatencyMon will let you know that you often don’t need to upgrade your hardware. Sometimes, solving performance issues is as easy as updating a driver, disabling a power-saving feature, or turning off a device you weren’t using in the first place. It’s a lot cheaper than buying new PC components, and can often completely solve the problem.
Download LatencyMon, click Start, and let it run while you go about your business. In a few minutes, you’ll know exactly what’s been slowing down your PC all along—no guesswork and technical diagnostics tools required.