News Discord Throttles Nvidia GPU Memory Clock Speeds

PiranhaTech

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Mar 20, 2021
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I have Discord set to not use hardware acceleration since I have a 12-core CPU and want to keep those GPU cycles free. I wonder if this would be affected with the hardware acceleration setting set to off. I do have a Radeon GPU in this system though.

I wonder if it's detecting that Discord isn't used that much GPU juice normally and is downthrottling the chip accordingly. Discord IS an Electron app afterall, so this may affect all Electron apps
 

russell_john

Honorable
Mar 25, 2018
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The new Discord application, when running in the background, will prevent the memory on Nvidia graphics cards from hitting their full speeds.

Discord Throttles Nvidia GPU Memory Clock Speeds : Read more

Discord running in the background while gaming has long affected the performance and there is really no need to run it while gaming anyway.

Rule Number One for Gaming: Turn off ALL unnecessary background applications dummy
 
I've been chatting with "Jhoanna" and "Nick O" from Discord support about this for a few days (I'm sure I'm not the only one). They seemed razor focused on whether there was a performance deficit with this. I ran several benchmarks to show that yes there is, small but measurable. I keep Afterburner etc running up front all the time and I first noticed the issue on Friday which I then traced back to Discord. Every fix they have suggested has not worked. For now I will keep Discord disabled and wait for the official fix, I mainly use it for text chat so I can run it on another machine or my phone in the meantime.

For those interested the performance drop is only around 1% using 3Dmark. Minuscule but it's still there, we paid good money for these cards and to have performance robbed even as low as this is a no go for me.
 
Discord running in the background while gaming has long affected the performance and there is really no need to run it while gaming anyway.

Rule Number One for Gaming: Turn off ALL unnecessary background applications dummy

Discord is the go to voice chat app for all manner of games. For FFXIV which I play it is pretty much the defacto standard VC app. In this regard it is necessary, but generally I agree with the rest of your statement.
 
Jan 31, 2023
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Discord running in the background while gaming has long affected the performance and there is really no need to run it while gaming anyway.

Rule Number One for Gaming: Turn off ALL unnecessary background applications dummy
I created an account on these forums for the sole purpose of telling you what an ignorant comment this is. I thought you were just trolling but I see you are listed as "reputable." Discord is the de facto program for team/squad/group voice communication.
 
Jan 31, 2023
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FWIW you can also easily change this setting with NVIDIA Profile Inspector:

wl1l05K.png
 

KyaraM

Admirable
Mar 11, 2022
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Discord running in the background while gaming has long affected the performance and there is really no need to run it while gaming anyway.

Rule Number One for Gaming: Turn off ALL unnecessary background applications dummy
Yeah, right. I'm sure my static will just love not getting calls anymore during raids... or strat discussions taking ages because you have to write instead of talk. Or, you know. Just talking because you are friends and want to spend time together.
 
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Interesting just checked it out and I'm losing ~500mbps (this might be an arbitrary 2.5% of memory clock from the CUDA flag as I'm running my memory at 20k). Just to test I started a game with Discord closed and the video card was fine, opened discord with the game up and there went the memory clock and closing Discord out brought the clock speed right back.

FWIW you can also easily change this setting with NVIDIA Profile Inspector:

wl1l05K.png
This worked perfectly fine for me.
 
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Ha, this is the cause of my driver crash in The Division 2 on my 3080ti, I could not figure out why I was crashing in that game, and everytime it does im in Discord talking to friends or watching them stream their gameplay, I took the last 3 hours just stressing my GPU thinking it might be something wrong with it... Oh discord....
 

schmak

Distinguished
Jan 26, 2007
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Made a huge difference (set with nvinsp) for me, I have been troubleshooting issues with Horizon View, Teams, and Broadcast, which I use daily, and this seemed to do the trick. You can literally see when it took effect.

image.png
 

InvalidError

Titan
Moderator
This reminds me of how my HD5770 dropped to 2D or idle clocks whenever I was playing a game with a video playing with hardware acceleration on Youtube, causing corrupt output on secondary displays and massively degraded game performance.
 

Lordgeorge16

Distinguished
Aug 5, 2013
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Discord running in the background while gaming has long affected the performance and there is really no need to run it while gaming anyway.

Rule Number One for Gaming: Turn off ALL unnecessary background applications dummy
Breaking news: local Tom's Hardware user outs himself as having no friends to voice chat with while playing video games! More at 11.
 

doughillman

Distinguished
Feb 13, 2012
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I created an account on these forums for the sole purpose of telling you what an ignorant comment this is. I thought you were just trolling but I see you are listed as "reputable." Discord is the de facto program for team/squad/group voice communication.

Yeah, I dug up my password and logged in for the first time in a decade just to dunk on this fool.