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When Discord is open in the background, NVIDIA card will not reach full speed

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Re: When Discord is open in the background, NVIDIA card will not reach full speed

#91

Post by ndriscoll »

MobiusHorizons wrote: post #68
yamtaddle wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's because a) people want high resolution, This cannot be any serious part of the reason, since literally playing 3D video games fullscreen at full resolution can use less power than Discord. [EDIT] For that matter, any streaming video platform. They're ~all extremely battery-efficient even when pushing 4k.

Video playback is low power primarily because GPUs (even embedded ones) have dedicated hardware for video decoding. Video chat requires also encoding video, which not all gpus provide hardware for. CPU encoding video is a very energy intensive task especially as the resolution increases.

Doesn't every consumer AMD/nVidia GPU and every consumer Intel CPU (as long as it has integrated graphics) made in the last 10 years have hardware accelerated H.264 encoding?

Re: When Discord is open in the background, NVIDIA card will not reach full speed

#92

Post by bobobob420 »

10000truths wrote: post #73
nightski wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video games have optimized rendering pipelines and assets. Discord is showing emojis, images that are 10MB+ each, and all kinds of user generated crap at high res that it doesn't have control over. Personally I'd prefer to go back to just text.

Of course they have control over it, it’s literally their own platform. There’s no reason that Discord can’t benefit from the same optimizations that video games use. If a AAA title can figure out how to render 100000+ polygons UV wrapped with several 4K resolution textures in the span of 16 ms, then a $15B valued company can certainly figure out to display emojis and large images without turning your notebook into a…

I assume Discord is built with electron. That should answer all your questions. Personally i dont use web apps on desktop..use discord in browser never had any issues

Re: When Discord is open in the background, NVIDIA card will not reach full speed

#93

Post by Laaas »

bob1029 wrote: post #38
miga wrote: post #4

There are many problems with discord, and GPU is not the worst one. Discord Snap has to block many unusual activities, but I still see these: * attempt to `ptrace` processes all the time; * using 99% CPU; * to work Discord needs some non-standard interfaces to be connected; * Discord tries to track which other programs you run by default and shares it. * too frequently restarting desktop integration snap until the lo…

>> blocking other programs using desktop integration for file dialogs: latency of several minutes, sometimes dialogs never appear. I think HN may have solved one of my most annoying technology mysteries... Definitely taking discord out of automatic startup. Moving back to teamspeak or some other system is quickly becoming a thing for me. I used to run a TS3 server for years.

Why not just use it through the browser? That's what I've been doing since the beginning.

Re: When Discord is open in the background, NVIDIA card will not reach full speed

#94

Post by snake_plissken »

brianshaler wrote: post #3
snake_plissken wrote: post #2

Discord can definitely do some strange things to your machine. I can't play DayZ when it's open, the game will not connect to any servers and errors out with this "player auth login state" message. I thought it was my internet connection but running a server locally also resulted in the same error. It took me a few months of on-and-off searching, but I eventually found a comment on a message board where someone had e…

Sounds like a port issue. I imagine the first thing most people did was list the ports in use when either app was running. Did the investigation end at finding the culprit or did they figure out the actual cause?

They never figured out the actual mechanism involved, just that running Discord caused the connection issue, and that when Discord wasn't running, they could connect to a server and play the game.

Re: When Discord is open in the background, NVIDIA card will not reach full speed

#95

Post by yamtaddle »

mnw21cam wrote: post #86
yamtaddle wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They ran fine on machines a hell of a lot weaker than that. If you had an actually-good desktop OS (uh, BeOS is the only example I know of—Linux, at the time, couldn't do this, even with minimalist window managers) you could even browse the web, have chat open, and be playing mp3s, and not hear so much as a pop or skip on the music, on a 166MHz Pentium (that's a single core, kiddos) with 128MB (luxury!) of memory.

I used to be able to do that on my 25MHz Amiga with 10MB of RAM. Static absolute task priority scheduling is actually a very good way to ensure your MP3 will play without stuttering.

Some of those more-obscure operating systems simply felt like magic. Refresh a webpage on Windows or Linux, mp3 you're playing pops and skips about half the time. Mouse just seemingly-randomly becomes unresponsive. BeOS on the same machine? Hard to load the system enough that playback isn't smooth, and input was only rarely anything other than instant-feeling. Closest I've seen to that recently is iOS, but it cheats by suspending or evicting backgrounded programs.

... but, point is, a chat app ought to be able to run smoothly using perhaps 10% of a single efficiency-core on an M1, when actively being used, and about 0% when inactive. These programs acting like they're mining Bitcoin just to let you chat, which we used to do on hardware far weaker than many modern thermostats have (hell, maybe even some lightbulbs), are absolute jokes.

Re: When Discord is open in the background, NVIDIA card will not reach full speed

#96

Post by doix »

criddell wrote: post #62
kibwen wrote: post #19

I exclusively use Discord in a browser tab. I simply won't use a dedicated app for anything that can be done in a web browser.

I’m the opposite. If there is a well written app on iOS or iPadOS, I’ll use it for the increased privacy protections, lower battery and CPU usage and (sometimes) lower bandwidth consumption. IMHO, mobile operating systems have gotten better than legacy desktop operating systems in a bunch of key areas. But of all the platforms, the web is the worst one. The web has tracking everywhere and often uses a lot of CPU, mem…

I can use uBlock on the web, I can't do that on iOS. I'm fairly confident that it gives me more privacy than what I can get on iOS. It's much easier for me to get a vague idea what a webapp is tracking and what it's doing. You can see all the network requests, you can disable javascript, disable access to certain APIs etc.

I bet iOS electron based apps are tracking significantly more than FF + uBlock. It's also why I strongly dislike Electron. It's basically Chrome without uBlock.

Re: When Discord is open in the background, NVIDIA card will not reach full speed

#97

Post by freeone3000 »

wkat4242 wrote: post #46
Karunamon wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like the exception that proves the rule to me. If every electron application is a bloated CPU/memory hog that ignores the OS conventions, save the one with major corporate resources backing it, that tells me that making electron apps not suck is out of the reach of most developers, and such a thing is probably inherent to the framework.

Also it's important to note that MS makes bit only the best performing electron app (VSCode) but also the worst (Teams). So even with MS' billions it's not guaranteed to become a quality product. Strange enough they're now touting the move to Edge WebView as the solution (since they finally acknowledge how bad Teams is) but never explained how this will solve the problem as it's just the same tech (chromium) undernea…

It's able to share one instance of the browser engine across multiple apps (the way that Chrome is able to share one instance across multiple web pages). It'll help some, but won't make up for whatever the hell react is doing all the time.

Re: When Discord is open in the background, NVIDIA card will not reach full speed

#98

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

dmonitor wrote: post #61
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I yarn for the simpler days of IRC, Pidgin and Skype where these apps ran fine on a 1GHz Pentium 3 chip with 256MB of RAM. Now you need a quad core 3GHz chip and 8GB RAM just to run a chat app reliably. Where did we go wrong?

I will never miss skype. that application was a buggy ass POS near the end.

I meant the pre-Microsoft Skype. That one was magic.

It used p-2-p over port 80 so it would always reach its destination no matter the firewall rules on your network, and it allowed file transfers up to 2GB(!) in size, in 2005(!).

Can present day Discord do that?

Re: When Discord is open in the background, NVIDIA card will not reach full speed

#99

Post by mixedCase »

saghm wrote: post #59
rob74 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So then I guess the advice is, if you have to use Discord, stick to the web version?

One sticking point for people might be the way push-to-talk works for the in-browser version; the shortcut to trigger it will only work when you have the browser window focused (I think due to limitations in how browsers can capture inputs when not focused, which is a pretty reasonable policy in general). Not only does this mean you'd need to alt-tab over whenever you want to push to talk (which isn't super easy for…

On Linux, I just tested that if you have a Mozilla Firefox window running on X (I tested on XWayland but it should work just as well on X11) with the Discord tab in view, you can use your desktop's/compositor global keyboard shortcut functionality to call xdotool to send a keyup/keydown event without focusing the window, like this:

    xdotool search --name 'Discord.*— Mozilla Firefox' keydown F9
    xdotool search --name 'Discord.*— Mozilla Firefox' keyup F9
I configured web Discord to use F9 as the push to talk button since it seemingly doesn't conflict with anything in Firefox, but you can then bind it to any key or mouse button on your global keyboard shortcut settings.

According to some people on StackExchange (I didn't test myself) this doesn't work if you're using Discord on Chromium-based browsers, which seem to reject xdotool events unless the window is focused (which xdotool can do for you, but doesn't work for the PTT usecase). Of course, this doesn't work on Firefox when running native Wayland windows because xdotool is X-only, and ydotool doesn't work either because it emulates a virtual device which would mean you still need to focus the window.

Re: When Discord is open in the background, NVIDIA card will not reach full speed

#100

Post by freeone3000 »

ndriscoll wrote: post #91
MobiusHorizons wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Video playback is low power primarily because GPUs (even embedded ones) have dedicated hardware for video decoding. Video chat requires also encoding video, which not all gpus provide hardware for. CPU encoding video is a very energy intensive task especially as the resolution increases.

Doesn't every consumer AMD/nVidia GPU and every consumer Intel CPU (as long as it has integrated graphics) made in the last 10 years have hardware accelerated H.264 encoding?

Yes, and it's probably good enough, but Nvidia's produces noticeably green (ironic) video. It's not a good encoder by any means.
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