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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

#181

Post by snickerbockers »

nightski wrote: post #64
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 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.

how much CPU/GPU power do you think it takes to display an image? Do you think this is something that video games have never had to do?

And if Discord is rendering a 10MB+ image then that's definitely a problem with discord. 1920x1080 at 8bpp isn't even 10MB.

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

#182

Post by OkayPhysicist »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #114
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skype was always a bloated mess. My gaming/friend group started off with it, but between the hard cutoff at 8? 16? people in a call, Skype taking up approximately half of our typically 4 GB of RAM, and people discovering you could crash people's clients by sending them several GB of ;) emoticons which, when rendered into smiley images, would overwhelm most anybody's computer, we ended up switching to Mumble, where we…

I beg to differ and strongly disagree. Pre-Microsoft Skype was a genius invention and performed admirably for the time (~2005) considering how limited PC specs and bandwidth were back then. 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(!). There were no better alternatives at the time.

hmm. My experience with it was ~2010-ish? Mumble came out in 2005, too. Can't say for certain when we switch to Mumble, but it looks like they've had some codex changes over time.

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

#183

Post by nikanj »

est31 wrote: post #18
yamtaddle wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend group started using Discord during the pandemic to continue our previously-in-person RPG sessions. I don't know how people find it tolerable. It'd kill the battery of a Macbook that could handle 6-8 hours of actual work (this is pre-M1) or 10ish hours of playing Netflix or whatever, in 2 hours flat, fans whirring madly the whole time. WTF. And it wasn't just one of us, and it wasn't just Macs, anyone on a b…

It's because a) people want high resolution, and b) software development is cutting corners like building on electron. Lastly, Discord has absolutely the worst software engineering behind it.

The worst software engineering? Have you met Teams? The flagship chat application from the world’s biggest software company, which is often unable to send chat messages

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

#184

Post by unethical_ban »

kefka_p wrote: post #157
seanhunter wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can’t wrap my brain around why a chat app would need 3D acceleration. A big part of discord's target community is gaming/gamers. One of the features it provides is the ability to livestream the game you are playing and view streams of games others are playing. Definitely not my area, but I wouldn't be surprised if streaming some game with an overlay would require 3d acceleration to not suck.

Streaming functionality isn’t chat, though. AMD gives you the option to not install streaming functionality when you install their drivers and I’m pretty sure they target gamers too. It reminds me of the age of Windows bloatware. Trying to pile all the ingredients on a single piece of bread does not a good sandwich make. On the contrary, it leaves me with an impression that they have to rely on the brand recognition…

Video and game streaming is one of its core features.

It is not a good user or server owner experience to have to manage multiple applications depending on feature. You can turn off 3d acceleration, if I understand correctly.

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

#185

Post by andrewmcwatters »

calimariae wrote: post #124
jhgg wrote: post #118

Hey all, I work at discord and specifically have been tracking this issue. We recently released support for AV1 hardware encoding for go live streams. However, the process of probing the GPU for what codecs it supports has triggered a latent nvidia driver bug. We are releasing a workaround some time today, and nvidia is releasing a driver update to address this issue as well. Apologies for any inconvenience this has…

I demand reimbursement for my dropped frames!

Nvidia promises to give you your frames back, but they will be triple buffered and may be replaced during runtime with newer frames. Render now while supplies last!

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

#186

Post by magicalhippo »

hn92726819 wrote: post #179
Aachen wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, that's what it sounds like when reading the headline. Card not reaching full speed under is an issue with the card. Impaired performance could be from occupying it, but that's not what it says (it sounds like clock scaling or something). That you've been investigating this for Nvidia is very nice of you!

> but that's not what it says That's one interpretation. But it could also read as "Discord bug instructs Nvidia card to throttle when in background". The title should have specified the bug was on Nvidia's end

A more likely scenario IMHO would have been "Discord causes excessive background GPU usage, causing throttling".

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

#187

Post by crummy »

sosodev wrote: post #128
est31 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because a) people want high resolution, and b) software development is cutting corners like building on electron. Lastly, Discord has absolutely the worst software engineering behind it.

How can you say Discord has the worst software engineering when they serve millions of active users with little downtime?

Seriously. More users than Slack, and I assume 99% of them are on a free plan too. Their engineering blog talks about some of the problems they deal with at that scale, impressive stuff:

https://discord.com/category/engineering

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

#188

Post by [deleted] »

snet0 wrote: post #121
jhgg wrote: post #118

Hey all, I work at discord and specifically have been tracking this issue. We recently released support for AV1 hardware encoding for go live streams. However, the process of probing the GPU for what codecs it supports has triggered a latent nvidia driver bug. We are releasing a workaround some time today, and nvidia is releasing a driver update to address this issue as well. Apologies for any inconvenience this has…

So this is an Nvidia-side bug, rather than a Discord-side bug? But Discord's new feature simply exposes it?

[deleted]

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

#189

Post by mosselman »

hn92726819 wrote: post #179
Aachen wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, that's what it sounds like when reading the headline. Card not reaching full speed under is an issue with the card. Impaired performance could be from occupying it, but that's not what it says (it sounds like clock scaling or something). That you've been investigating this for Nvidia is very nice of you!

> but that's not what it says That's one interpretation. But it could also read as "Discord bug instructs Nvidia card to throttle when in background". The title should have specified the bug was on Nvidia's end

> But it could also read as "Discord bug instructs Nvidia card to throttle when in background".

That is how I read it

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

#190

Post by thewataccount »

Aachen wrote: post #163
jhgg wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct.

I mean, that's what it sounds like when reading the headline. Card not reaching full speed under is an issue with the card. Impaired performance could be from occupying it, but that's not what it says (it sounds like clock scaling or something). That you've been investigating this for Nvidia is very nice of you!

My immediate thought was "Oh it's hardware acceleration must be using up/reserving resources" which is decently common especially among chromium/electron based programs.
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