DirectInput8 EnumDevices sometimes painfully slow

Question

Sometimes (in about 50% of runs), EnumDevices takes 5-10 seconds to return. Normally it is almost instant. I couldn\'t find any other reports of this kind of behaviour.

Answer 1

This has been plaguing me as a developer and my friend as a user for years. All games using DInput, SDL SDL_INIT_JOYSTICK or anything depending on that, took extremely long to initialize.

It was caused by a faulty driver of a DAC, and as pointed out by DaFox, disabling the corresponding USB Input Device resolved the issue. Although it's labeled with a different manufacturer name, the vendor IDs match.

The hardware ID of the device is USB\VID_262A&PID_9023&REV_0001&MI_00.

Answer 2

As DaFox has pointed out, a likely cause appears to be certain device drivers being enabled. I contacted JDS Labs support (who sell one device which happens to install one such driver) and they kindly pointed out that the root cause is actually a bug within Windows (not the installed driver), and they actually provide the solution on their troubleshooting page. See Games hang or experience loading delays, which explicitly mentions VID_262. Disabling this driver fixes the issue without apparent side effects (under the condition that that is the only driver triggering the bug). As for what exactly is going wrong within Windows, here there be dragons.

So I guess the go-to solution (for users) is to scrape all the troubleshooting and FAQ pages for all devices which you have ever connected to your system and see if there is a mention of delays/lag caused by a driver.

As a software developer, you will probably want to benchmark the execution time of the affected code and kindly tell the user there is something wrong with their system configuration and where to look for how to fix it in case it is unreasonably long.

Answer 3

I was running into this too, largely as an end user, but it's been annoying the hell out of me for years. I didn't realize it was this issue until I ran into it on an open source project and was able to debug it.

Turns out it was my USB Headphone DAC (The Objective DAC from Massdrop), it installs the driver: wdma_usb.inf_amd64_134cb113911feba4\wdma_usb.inf for Device Instance ID USB\VID_262A&PID_1048&MI_01\7&F217D4F&0&0001 and then shows up in Device Manager under Sound, video and game controllers as: ODAC-revB USB DAC and, under Human Interface Devices as: USB Input Device and HID-compliant consumer control device.

I have no idea what the HID entries do but... When they are enabled and this DAC is set as the Audio Output device both IDirectInput8_CreateDevice and EnumDevices are painfully slow. Disabling the "USB Input Device" entry seems to cause no negative effects and completely solves my issue.

Changing the Audio output from the DAC to anything else also weirdly solved the issue.

This was so bad that it made the Gamepad Configuration dialog joy.cpl unusable, hanging and eventually crashing.

I was wanting this to just be a comment but I don't have enough rep for it, and this is pretty much the only place on the internet that describes this problem though so hopefully this helps someone else one day!

Answer 4

I had the same issue. I have a Corsair K65 LUX RGB keyboard. I updated CUE and it seems to have fixed the issue

Answer 5

Same issue with Corsair K70 Keyboard. Quickly reconnecting keyboard fixes this, until next time. Usually happens after some DirectInput devices removed from the system or go to sleep.

Answer 6

Got same issue when having my Corsair K55 Keyboard. Changing the keyboard of USB port fixes the issue for a while, but then it comes back later on. So it seems to be a buggy drivers issue.