Out of curiosity, why not release BIOS mod with a fix? Atleast personal laptops (out of warranty) can benefit out of it until Asus fixes their sht.
People blame Windows being slow and etc but most of the times hardware manufactures don't even get into this level to make best out of thier hardware. This is the reason why Apple is so successful, they control hardware, software while in open world, software like Linux/Windows is written by someone while hardware is designed by someone else.
I have one of these, a Zephyrus G15. That it had an AMD CPU and Nvidia GPU should have been a red flag that support would be really poor. Only a year out of warranty, it is a brick on a shelf because the thermals are so atrocious it pretty much burned itself out, and even with a thorough new application of thermal paste through a multi hour process there just isn't any way to get it to perform within spec. Supposedly, if you RMA it through ASUS they will charge you something like $700 and be unlikely to fix it. They have an insane dud rate, and even when it does work the hardware is barely hanging on. Several acquaintances have had similar problems.
It drastically reduced my perception of Asus as a brand - I wanted something I could game with, it promised the moon of portability and performance but they couldn't pull it off.
I have an older ASUS laptop from 2015 which also has (more minor than this!) ACPI state management bugs. I initially bought that machine because it was a pretty high-end and was somewhat disappointed about both the build quality and the firmware/software support.
... and people are looking forward to signed UEFI and ACPI on ARM systems too. How do they expect an ACPI written in a chinese sweatshop will work if Asus quality is this low?
I have a 2024 Zephyrus G14 and it has bursts of stuttering which seem to be directly linked to running off USB-C power. It doesn't do it on the original power brick, but on a 70W USB power brick, it slows down massively every now and then, to the point where the mouse cursor is only updating every few seconds and any playing audio starts underrunning buffers. Unplugging USB power immediately clears the issue up for a while. It's fine running off battery, and it's fine when I plug USB power back in, even straight away.
It does other stupid things with power management, too:
- There seems to be some "cooldown" logic that keeps it awake with the fan running for a while (sometimes minutes) after closing the lid. If I just unplug the laptop stick it straight in a backpack, it'll keep doing this (getting hotter and hotter, and burning half of the battery capacity) until it hits the critical high temp shutdown. It's great fun taking it out at the start of a plane flight and finding out it's on low battery and has bbq'd itself.
- Even if I do wait for the fan to turn off before stashing the laptop, when I open the lid and wake it up, it immediately goes into hibernate mode, and I have to wait for it to finish hibernating, turn it back on, and wait for it to boot up, which is really frustrating.
The solution to both of these (for me) is to reassign the power button to be 'hibernate' instead of 'sleep', and to explicitly hibernate it every time I'm packing it up. It's still stupid and annoying, and a damn shame because it's otherwise a really nice laptop. The OLED screen is beautiful and the build quality feels great. I just wish it wasn't crippled.
Short version: don't buy ASUS gaming laptops until this is definiteively fixed, and if you one under warranty, file a warranty claim, being prepared to go to Small Claims Court.
Impressive that they managed to ship crippling stuttering for 4 years in gaming laptops specifically. Makes you wonder about the end user psychology, evidently they didn't get a show stopping rate of product returns.
A quote from one of the linked reddit threads. I wonder if the warranty trip is part of their scheme.
"I did everything you suggested , but nothing changed. I send it back via garante. I am curious what they do whit it."
"what was it at the end? did they respond?"
"They have claimed that the plato works perfectly. So basically i just got use to it. I am using bluetooth earbuds all the time so i cant notice the problems."
> Impressive that they managed to ship crippling stuttering for 4 years in gaming laptops specifically. Makes you wonder about the end user psychology, evidently they didn't get a show stopping rate of product returns
It's a gaming laptop. If you're playing any game released in the past 5 years, odds are you're getting constant stutters anyway due to Unreal Engine 5. And Windows 11 is a slow, bloated mess, too, so that covers stutters outside of games.
For most end users, and especially gamers, stuttering and overall bad performance is just the new normal that they've come to accept and even embrace. The recent success of Borderlands 4, a game that struggles to run smoothly on the best and most expensive hardware available today, is just the latest and best proof of this. If you complain about it, you'll be called poor for not owning a $3000 GPU and/or a luddite for not wanting to play at 720p 30fps AI-upscaled to 4K 300fps.
So what should user do before byuing? Reasonably it might search for "<modelname> reviews". Such reviews include a number of throughput tests but they never test for latency.
This might be a culture issue. At least we should push for popular benchmark solutions to include latency tests. In ideal world laptop reviewers should also test keyboard latency but I do not see how it might be automated.
My HP screen (HP Aero 13, not a gaming laptop, with a integrated gpu only) does flicker, turning completely off and then on, and this issue doesn't appear when connecting to external monitor.
The same happens under linux as well.
This post had me curious about the ACPI now... maybe I can follow along !
I do not have the same technical depth to dig this far as the author, but this kind of problem seems pretty common on laptops, especially those with "switchable" iGPU/dGPU setups.
I had an Acer laptop about 7-8 years ago with almost the exact same latency symptoms. In the end I just disabled the dGPU in the BIOS (since I only used it for office work), and that instantly solved the issue.
This kind of thing is very infuriating because not only is it hard to track down the root cause (which I am very grateful the author did), but it is also even harder to get the vendor to actually acknowledge or fix it.
I wonder if the "programmer" (and I use this term very loosely) who wrote that sleep-in-an-interrupt code ever tested the code personally, or if it was some other distant responsibility-diluted department of a hundred other lamers who didn't care "because the automated tests all pass". This is a situation where dogfooding, in the original Microsoft sense, would definitely be beneficial as among the developers experiencing this on their own machines, surely one would be tempted to fix it.
This is an amazing discovery, article, and fix proposal. Fantastic work, very impressive and also very instructive on how things work on modern PCs and how far you can actually dig to get at stuff that is "supposed" to be hidden.
As someone who has written embedded firmware for many years (not for PCs), I can only dream of an end user being this capable to discover a bug. I want to live in the world where Asus immediately send an e-mail offering some kind of short-term contracting work to fly in and talk to their firmware people for a few days and get $FIVE_FIGURES or something, and leave with an updated laptop running their new production BIOS.
Obviously this bug has gone un-fixed for four years so that is not the world we're in. That makes me sad. :|
Sometime around 2015 I promised myself to never buy a laptop with switchable graphics again. This has worked well so far.
But it never ceases to amuse me watching brands that position themselves as 'premium' spending pennies on firmware development team somewhere down in a basement compared to millions they spend on shiny marketing.
Likewise - I bought one laptop with "Optimus" in 2013 and swore to never do so again. I sometimes have to break out the desktop or rent a server but I have never regretted going iGPU only.
Congratulations ASUS for 0.01% of your marketing budget you could have fixed the experience of your millions of users, reduced the amount of replaced computers, improved your brand positive views... This once again proves that many companies are absolutely mismanaged and think marketing will make them more efficient than good engineering...
I'm honestly a little surprised that ACPI has a Sleep()-like function at all, I can't really imagine many situations where the firmware actually wants the user operating system to wait for any real length of time, as that would block any other ACPI events, even if it wasn't in an interrupt handler. I feel there's pretty easy ways to deadlock the system in that sort of situation.
And also surprised that windows actually allows the ACPI driver to sleep in an interrupt handler - on Linux that'll immediately BUG()... Unless windows doesn't and the above ACPI blocking is what they're measuring here.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 73.0 ms ] threadPeople blame Windows being slow and etc but most of the times hardware manufactures don't even get into this level to make best out of thier hardware. This is the reason why Apple is so successful, they control hardware, software while in open world, software like Linux/Windows is written by someone while hardware is designed by someone else.
It's unbelievable that something this bad has been shipping for four years. I guess I know what I'm not buying, at least...
It drastically reduced my perception of Asus as a brand - I wanted something I could game with, it promised the moon of portability and performance but they couldn't pull it off.
Does anyone know if windows can do the same ?
It does other stupid things with power management, too:
- There seems to be some "cooldown" logic that keeps it awake with the fan running for a while (sometimes minutes) after closing the lid. If I just unplug the laptop stick it straight in a backpack, it'll keep doing this (getting hotter and hotter, and burning half of the battery capacity) until it hits the critical high temp shutdown. It's great fun taking it out at the start of a plane flight and finding out it's on low battery and has bbq'd itself.
- Even if I do wait for the fan to turn off before stashing the laptop, when I open the lid and wake it up, it immediately goes into hibernate mode, and I have to wait for it to finish hibernating, turn it back on, and wait for it to boot up, which is really frustrating.
The solution to both of these (for me) is to reassign the power button to be 'hibernate' instead of 'sleep', and to explicitly hibernate it every time I'm packing it up. It's still stupid and annoying, and a damn shame because it's otherwise a really nice laptop. The OLED screen is beautiful and the build quality feels great. I just wish it wasn't crippled.
A quote from one of the linked reddit threads. I wonder if the warranty trip is part of their scheme.
"I did everything you suggested , but nothing changed. I send it back via garante. I am curious what they do whit it."
"what was it at the end? did they respond?"
"They have claimed that the plato works perfectly. So basically i just got use to it. I am using bluetooth earbuds all the time so i cant notice the problems."
It's a gaming laptop. If you're playing any game released in the past 5 years, odds are you're getting constant stutters anyway due to Unreal Engine 5. And Windows 11 is a slow, bloated mess, too, so that covers stutters outside of games.
For most end users, and especially gamers, stuttering and overall bad performance is just the new normal that they've come to accept and even embrace. The recent success of Borderlands 4, a game that struggles to run smoothly on the best and most expensive hardware available today, is just the latest and best proof of this. If you complain about it, you'll be called poor for not owning a $3000 GPU and/or a luddite for not wanting to play at 720p 30fps AI-upscaled to 4K 300fps.
This might be a culture issue. At least we should push for popular benchmark solutions to include latency tests. In ideal world laptop reviewers should also test keyboard latency but I do not see how it might be automated.
It feels a bit of a shame to wrap it all up in an AI-written summary, but I guess if that was the only way to get the info out, so be it.
I do not have the same technical depth to dig this far as the author, but this kind of problem seems pretty common on laptops, especially those with "switchable" iGPU/dGPU setups.
I had an Acer laptop about 7-8 years ago with almost the exact same latency symptoms. In the end I just disabled the dGPU in the BIOS (since I only used it for office work), and that instantly solved the issue.
This kind of thing is very infuriating because not only is it hard to track down the root cause (which I am very grateful the author did), but it is also even harder to get the vendor to actually acknowledge or fix it.
As someone who has written embedded firmware for many years (not for PCs), I can only dream of an end user being this capable to discover a bug. I want to live in the world where Asus immediately send an e-mail offering some kind of short-term contracting work to fly in and talk to their firmware people for a few days and get $FIVE_FIGURES or something, and leave with an updated laptop running their new production BIOS.
Obviously this bug has gone un-fixed for four years so that is not the world we're in. That makes me sad. :|
Edit: s/fix/fix proposal/.
But it never ceases to amuse me watching brands that position themselves as 'premium' spending pennies on firmware development team somewhere down in a basement compared to millions they spend on shiny marketing.
And also surprised that windows actually allows the ACPI driver to sleep in an interrupt handler - on Linux that'll immediately BUG()... Unless windows doesn't and the above ACPI blocking is what they're measuring here.