Question Playing video in the background causes stutter whilst gaming ?

[Zodiacx]

Hi all,

I'm encountering a really odd issue with a new build. Specs are:

CPU: Ryzen 7800X3D
RAM: 64GB 6000Mhz Corsair Dominator Platinum [CMT64GX5M2B6000C40]
Mobo: MSI X670E Tomahawk
GPU: 7900XTX
PSU: Corsair 850w RME

Under normal use everything is fine, when gaming I get great performance, everything is super smooth. However, if I try and play a video in the background whilst I'm gaming (either YT or Twitch), the game will simply freeze every few seconds, and becomes unplayable. As soon as I close the tab with the video playing, the game will return to playing perfectly smoothly without any stutter at all. I have tried playing just audio using the Apple Music app and this does not create any stutter so appears to be a video related issue. To note, it's simply stutter and appears at uniform time intervals, almost like clock work every 5-6 seconds or so the game will freeze for 1-2 seconds and then carry on at 144fps if there is a video playing.

I am also on a 1 monitor setup rather than 2 monitors. (LG 27 inch). It's also nothing internet related, I have a steady 940Mbps and I get this issue whether I am playing online games or single player games (tested with CS2 / Apex Legends and Witcher 3)

So far I have tried:

- Different browsers, happens with both Chrome and Firefox. I have also tried turning off HW acceleration
- Turning on and off game mode in Windows
- Checking all drivers are up to date, flashed BIOS to latest version on the off chance this made any difference.
- Performed clean driver reinstall with DDU
-Tried uninstalling and re-installing audio drivers, also tried an iFi external DAC to see if it was a sound related issue.
- Reinstalled Windows
- Tried putting my old 2070 super into the system.
- Ran Prime95 and Memtest64 to see if any issues were detected. No issues found after 45 mins.

None of the above has fixed the issue, if I don't play any video in the background there are no issues at all. However as soon as I try and play a video the game becomes unplayable from stutter. Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks.

 

[DaleH]

Hi all,

I'm encountering a really odd issue with a new build. Specs are:

CPU: Ryzen 7800X3D
RAM: 64GB 6000Mhz Corsair Dominator Platinum [CMT64GX5M2B6000C40]
Mobo: MSI X670E Tomahawk
GPU: 7900XTX
PSU: Corsair 850w RME

Under normal use everything is fine, when gaming I get great performance, everything is super smooth. However, if I try and play a video in the background whilst I'm gaming (either YT or Twitch), the game will simply freeze every few seconds, and becomes unplayable. As soon as I close the tab with the video playing, the game will return to playing perfectly smoothly without any stutter at all. I have tried playing just audio using the Apple Music app and this does not create any stutter so appears to be a video related issue. To note, it's simply stutter and appears at uniform time intervals, almost like clock work every 5-6 seconds or so the game will freeze for 1-2 seconds and then carry on at 144fps if there is a video playing.

I am also on a 1 monitor setup rather than 2 monitors. (LG 27 inch). It's also nothing internet related, I have a steady 940Mbps and I get this issue whether I am playing online games or single player games (tested with CS2 / Apex Legends and Witcher 3)

So far I have tried:

- Different browsers, happens with both Chrome and Firefox. I have also tried turning off HW acceleration
- Turning on and off game mode in Windows
- Checking all drivers are up to date, flashed BIOS to latest version on the off chance this made any difference.
- Performed clean driver reinstall with DDU
-Tried uninstalling and re-installing audio drivers, also tried an iFi external DAC to see if it was a sound related issue.
- Reinstalled Windows
- Tried putting my old 2070 super into the system.
- Ran Prime95 and Memtest64 to see if any issues were detected. No issues found after 45 mins.

None of the above has fixed the issue, if I don't play any video in the background there are no issues at all. However as soon as I try and play a video the game becomes unplayable from stutter. Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks.

This just sounds like your system is being put to the maximum of its capabilities. I'll bet that viewing task manager changes when this happens will tell you what the bottleneck is.

 

[Zodiacx]

Hi Dale,

Appreciate your reply, but surely a brand new system with those specs should be able to cope with streaming a 1080p video in the background and playing Apex Legends? I could do that on my old system (with the 2070 super in) with a Ryzen 3900 in it.

I just opened the game and tried playing a video and there's no particular spike on task manager when the freezing occurs. The CPU utilisation is at 18%, GPU at 27% and that's on my old 2070 super, it was even lower on the 7900xtx.

 

[DaleH]

Hi Dale,

Appreciate your reply, but surely a brand new system with those specs should be able to cope with streaming a 1080p video in the background and playing Apex Legends? I could do that on my old system (with the 2070 super in) with a Ryzen 3900 in it.

I just opened the game and tried playing a video and there's no particular spike on task manager when the freezing occurs. The CPU utilisation is at 18%, GPU at 27% and that's on my old 2070 super, it was even lower on the 7900xtx.

I take it that nothing changes as far as disk accesses, memory usage?

 

[35below0]

What was your old memory? Just out of curiosity.

What is the model of your SSD?

 

[Zodiacx]

Nope - no spikes on disk access or memory usage, memory usage and disk access both sit flat.

Having explored further, if I play a video off my hard drive in the background there is no stutter at all, so it only appears with streaming video which I don't understand at all.

My old memory was some Corsair Vengeance 32GB DDR4 3200MHz.

Current SSD is a Western Digital SN850X 2TB.

 

[helper800]

This is an extremely common issue with both Nvidia and AMD graphics cards. The reason this happens is because the GPU has to do two tasks at the same time, render your video game and encode/decode your video. I would try turning off GPU acceleration in your browser and see if the ceases the stuttering in your game. Also make sure the game you are playing is in borderless windowed mode.

 

[Zodiacx]

Hi - I've tried turning GPU acceleration off in Chrome and have tried full screen windowed in CS2 / Borderless Window in Apex Legends and still get the same stutter unfortunately.

 

[helper800]

Hi - I've tried turning GPU acceleration off in Chrome and have tried full screen windowed in CS2 / Borderless Window in Apex Legends and still get the same stutter unfortunately.

Do you have any ingame CPU/GPU monitoring overlay software running? Try disabling all of those and restart to test. Have you tried a clean boot for the purposes of eliminating third party services causing the issue? Do you have a bunch of browser extensions installed? Try running the browser with those disabled, or open up a browser with none of them installed. Are you using any form of VRR? This would be free-sync and g-sync.

 

[35below0]

This is an extremely common issue with both Nvidia and AMD graphics cards. The reason this happens is because the GPU has to do two tasks at the same time, render your video game and encode/decode your video.

Why does it not happen when playing video from the hard drive?

 

[helper800]

Why does it not happen when playing video from the hard drive?

If you are using a video player application to run the video that is stored on the HDD then the difference is that a video from a browser is being streamed, and the video player is the browser itself. There is something about playing videos from a browser that is causing the issue. I seriously doubt it has anything to do with your internet connection itself. There are a few differences between what happens when playing videos from a local drive vs a browser.

A brief and incomprehensive example below illustrates the differences.

A video player that plays a video locally only has to load the video into memory from the drive, and then the application uses CPU to decompress the video file, then the application uses the GPU to encode/decode to play the video.

A video that is played from a browser has several more steps. First the video has to be temporarily downloaded to storage (CPU and storage task) in chunks (not all at once), then the video is loaded into memory by those received chunks, then the video is decompressed by the CPU piece by piece, and then the GPU decode/encodes the video part by part. The buffering of the video is how much of this process is done in advanced of the video being played.

 

[SkyNetRising]

if I don't play any video in the background there are no issues at all. However as soon as I try and play a video the game becomes unplayable from stutter. Does anyone have any ideas?

Try enabling integrated graphics.
Connect second monitor to video output on motherboard and
run videos on second monitor.

 

[DaleH]

Nope - no spikes on disk access or memory usage, memory usage and disk access both sit flat.

Having explored further, if I play a video off my hard drive in the background there is no stutter at all, so it only appears with streaming video which I don't understand at all.

My old memory was some Corsair Vengeance 32GB DDR4 3200MHz.

Current SSD is a Western Digital SN850X 2TB.

If it is only occurring on streaming video, I would think that would point to perhaps your internet speed.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Does this only happen when you watch videos via a streaming service, or any video? Like if you play a video locally using whatever your video player app of choice is.

Also yeah, it doesn't make sense to me watching a video on YouTube would cause games to stutter. I do this all the time and my games run fine.

 

[Zodiacx]

Do you have any ingame CPU/GPU monitoring overlay software running? Try disabling all of those and restart to test. Have you tried a clean boot for the purposes of eliminating third party services causing the issue? Do you have a bunch of browser extensions installed? Try running the browser with those disabled, or open up a browser with none of them installed. Are you using any form of VRR? This would be free-sync and g-sync.

Thanks for all these suggestions! I tried all of them, turning off extensions, disabling gsync, turning off overlay, none of them worked until I tried the clean boot.

That has fixed everything, I get absolutely no stutter at all now. I've worked throgh my processes re-enabling them and it seems to be Norton. I didn't think it would be that as I had Norton on my old PC and had no issues at all.

However, I have Norton 360 on this PC and I hadn't really looked into what was different. It has some 'game optimization' features on it which were automatically enabled. As soon as I disabled this the stutter went. It appears there is something which restricts resource usage for user processes and priotises game performance on systems with 4 or more CPU cores. Not entirely sure what it was doing but disabling it has solved my problems.

Appreciate all the responses from everyone!

 

[DaleH]

Thanks for the feedback. There can be so many variables that it can be difficult to pinpoint the cause of a problem.

 

[hotaru.hino]

I've worked throgh my processes re-enabling them and it seems to be Norton. I didn't think it would be that as I had Norton on my old PC and had no issues at all.

However, I have Norton 360 on this PC and I hadn't really looked into what was different. It has some 'game optimization' features on it which were automatically enabled. As soon as I disabled this the stutter went. It appears there is something which restricts resource usage for user processes and priotises game performance on systems with 4 or more CPU cores. Not entirely sure what it was doing but disabling it has solved my problems.

I'd ditch Norton. Given what you're describing here, I don't see what value this software can add that Windows doesn't do already.

I like to think for things like this, Microsoft has a reason for their version of the feature to work as intended. For someone like Norton, they'll do the bare minimum to pass a legal smoke test because all they want is your subscription money.

 

[35below0]

I know it wasn't Norton, but i remember long ago an anti-virus suite crashed a game i was trying to play because it "detected a service was trying to access hardware resources on the PC". The hardware in question being the graphics card... 😒

How can i take anti-virus seriously? It's supposed to prevent malware from hogging resources and causing problems and crashes, not cause them!
Of course, security is important but too many "solutions" are bloated.