i am almost at my wit's end trying to figure out what is going on here so any advice is greatly appreciated.
to sum it up, i have a dual-monitor setup where i use the primary monitor for playing games and the secondary monitor for watching youtube or browsing the internet. today i turned on my computer and for whatever reason, if i have a youtube video playing and a game window is the primary focus, the youtube video becomes so audibly/visibly choppy that it's unwatchable. the video is fully buffered when this is happening as well, so likely not an internet issue.
i did not install anything or make any changes to any hardware or software configurations.
i tested this in firefox (my primary browser), chrome, and edge, while playing both elden ring and final fantasy xiv and the results were exactly the same no matter what combination of game/browser i was using.
i watched my CPU and GPU usage in HWmonitor, and i did see the GPU usage spiking to 100% at times, but the stuttering seems to happen regardless of the gpu usage %. cpu usage never went above 90%, and temps never went above 70 for either the CPU or GPU.
my pc:
ROG STRIX Z490-H GAMING (updated the bios to the latest available version last week)
Intel Core i5 10600k (not overclocked)
nVidia GeForce RTX 3070 TI (just purchased in February)
16gb memory
Windows running on a 250gb NVMe
MSI G32CQ4 (primary monitor)
ASUS MG248 (secondary monitor)
this issue does NOT occur when playing a local video file directly from my computer, only when streaming. it happens on youtube, vimeo, hulu, netflix, etc.
things i have already tried:
restarting the computer
running DDU to completely remove nvidia drivers and reinstall fresh
disabling hardware acceleration in the browser
changing the refresh rates of both monitors (primary to 120 and secondary to 60, but both at 60 also seemed to not change anything)
disabling geforce overlay
running the game in windowed, borderless windowed, and fullscreen modes
capping the in-game framerate at 30, 60, and 120, and removing the cap all together
using nvidia profile inspector to reset profiles to default (i hadn't changed anything to begin with but better safe than sorry)
changing graphic settings ingame to the bare minimum
changing power management mode to "prefer maximum performance" in the nvidia control panel
closing all non-essential background programs
for what it's worth, everything on the computer seems to become slightly less responsive when playing a game on the primary monitor. for instance, if i have firefox as my primary focus, i can cycle through tabs and they load instantly. if i have my game as the primary focus but then click on a tab in firefox to change it, the application freezes for a second before loading the new tab. this was not happening before today. i have also noticed that the desktop icons on my primary monitor are less... responsive? than they used to be? i recorded a video to show what i mean:
this is how icons behave on my secondary monitor:
and this is how they have started behaving on my primary monitor. notice how they don't always get highlighted when i mouse over them:
i feel like i've tried every solution i can find by googling short of a full reinstall of windows. i don't know what else to try. i was having 0 performance issues before today.
to sum it up, i have a dual-monitor setup where i use the primary monitor for playing games and the secondary monitor for watching youtube or browsing the internet. today i turned on my computer and for whatever reason, if i have a youtube video playing and a game window is the primary focus, the youtube video becomes so audibly/visibly choppy that it's unwatchable. the video is fully buffered when this is happening as well, so likely not an internet issue.
i did not install anything or make any changes to any hardware or software configurations.
i tested this in firefox (my primary browser), chrome, and edge, while playing both elden ring and final fantasy xiv and the results were exactly the same no matter what combination of game/browser i was using.
i watched my CPU and GPU usage in HWmonitor, and i did see the GPU usage spiking to 100% at times, but the stuttering seems to happen regardless of the gpu usage %. cpu usage never went above 90%, and temps never went above 70 for either the CPU or GPU.
my pc:
ROG STRIX Z490-H GAMING (updated the bios to the latest available version last week)
Intel Core i5 10600k (not overclocked)
nVidia GeForce RTX 3070 TI (just purchased in February)
16gb memory
Windows running on a 250gb NVMe
MSI G32CQ4 (primary monitor)
ASUS MG248 (secondary monitor)
this issue does NOT occur when playing a local video file directly from my computer, only when streaming. it happens on youtube, vimeo, hulu, netflix, etc.
things i have already tried:
restarting the computer
running DDU to completely remove nvidia drivers and reinstall fresh
disabling hardware acceleration in the browser
changing the refresh rates of both monitors (primary to 120 and secondary to 60, but both at 60 also seemed to not change anything)
disabling geforce overlay
running the game in windowed, borderless windowed, and fullscreen modes
capping the in-game framerate at 30, 60, and 120, and removing the cap all together
using nvidia profile inspector to reset profiles to default (i hadn't changed anything to begin with but better safe than sorry)
changing graphic settings ingame to the bare minimum
changing power management mode to "prefer maximum performance" in the nvidia control panel
closing all non-essential background programs
for what it's worth, everything on the computer seems to become slightly less responsive when playing a game on the primary monitor. for instance, if i have firefox as my primary focus, i can cycle through tabs and they load instantly. if i have my game as the primary focus but then click on a tab in firefox to change it, the application freezes for a second before loading the new tab. this was not happening before today. i have also noticed that the desktop icons on my primary monitor are less... responsive? than they used to be? i recorded a video to show what i mean:
this is how icons behave on my secondary monitor:
and this is how they have started behaving on my primary monitor. notice how they don't always get highlighted when i mouse over them:
i feel like i've tried every solution i can find by googling short of a full reinstall of windows. i don't know what else to try. i was having 0 performance issues before today.
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