Discord might be throttling your Nvidia GPU's memory

[ouroesa]

 

Summary

If you frequently leave Discord open on your desktop and have recently noticed degraded game performance from your Nvidia GPU, a Discord glitch might be the culprit. Nvidia will release a fix soon, but also offers directions for manually rectifying the problem.

 

Quotes

Quote

The latest update to the Discord software results in a throttled memory clock on Nvidia graphics cards. When the software runs in the background, the graphics card will fail to hit the maximum memory clock, leading to a performance loss. It's an intriguing bug since it affects Nvidia graphics cards only, and more specifically, the memory subsystem. The chipmaker didn't specify which models are impacted, so we can only assume that all graphics cards from the company are affected.

 

Nvidia didn't share how Discord disrupts the memory on the graphics card. However, Discord recently enabled AV1 support for Nvidia's latest GeForce RTX 40-series (Ada Lovelace) graphics cards, so the bug could be potentially related to AV1 encoding support for video streaming. Nonetheless, it's a bug that has managed to slip through the developers.

 

Nvidia has stated it will push a fix for PC users with an over-the-air (OTA) update. However, there's a simple solution if you don't want to wait for the official fix.

 

My thoughts

This is unfortunate but at least not a big deal. I’ve tested this with and RTX 4000 series but don't seem to be affected. My suspicion is because I use MSI afterburner with manual overclocks/undervolt. I did try 'resetting' values to default in MSI Afterburner but memory frequency still did not lower when opening Discord (joined voice channels, streamed my monitor etc).

 

For those having the issue, most suggest using GeForce 3D Profile Manager and change the Discord profile. Would be interested to see if just installing MSI Afterburner also fixes the problem since I'm not affected.

 

Sources

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/discord-throttles-nvidia-gpu-memory-clock-speeds#xenforo-comments-3794740

https://www.techspot.com/news/97449-discord-might-throttling-nvidia-gpu-memory.html

[Salv8 (sam)]

this client is so poorly made it actively drags down the rest of your computer with it, like a cancerous tumor in your body.

those third party clients are looking quite attractive, all they really need is robust plugin support and they can actually rival the offical client.

[ouroesa]

1 hour ago, Salv8 (sam) said:

this client is so poorly made it actively drags down the rest of your computer with it, like a cancerous tumor in your body.

those third party clients are looking quite attractive, all they really need is robust plugin support and they can actually rival the offical client.

I feel you. Actually miss Teamspeak a little, it's unfortunate that most communities moved to Discord. Probably because of lack of feature updates such as screen sharing, ease of use (new users find it difficult to use for some reason), watch together etc. The interface could use an update to make it feel less intimidating for the general public. 

[williamcll]

Discord also never recovers (you will need to restart discord by exiting) if you update your drivers while it's running. Very odd for a chromium based app.

[Kisai]

19 minutes ago, williamcll said:

Discord also never recovers (you will need to restart discord by exiting) if you update your drivers while it's running. Very odd for a chromium based app.

The Steam client, and other Electron/nw.js/Chromium based apps do the same. When the video drivers are reinstalled, the app is just screwy that you have to ctrl-alt-del to close it, because you can't actually get to the exit button or navigate the menu with the keyboard to do so.

[vertigo220]

I recently switched away from Discord due to issues with my account and their totally useless "support" and, in the process, found a bunch of other reasons to do so (as if I needed any more, and already had other issues with them even before these more recent ones), such as poor TOS, GDPR violations, attempts to harvest phone numbers (locking people out of their accounts until they provide a phone number), tracking running processes on computers, keeping history activity even when tracking is disabled, monitoring conversations and banning for saying certain things (they have both said they will do this and there have been cases of it happening), and moderators abusing their power, including selectively choosing what content is allowed while banning for similar content and allowing CP and grooming to occur. This provides a good overview of a lot of the problems, but there's plenty more info all over. And I'm sure someone will counter some of this, but even if some of it is debatable, the fact is much of it isn't, and Discord is a closed-source application that offers a "free" service to most users and therefore has to be making money somehow, with no way to truly know what they are and are not doing.

 

So my recommendation is to just ditch it if possible and move to another service. The standard options are Matrix, XMPP, and Guilded, all of which I researched and tried with a friend, as well as others like Revolt and qTox. Based on my research and experience, and my friend's experience and feedback, we've settled on Matrix. It's come a long way in the past few years and is only slightly more difficult than Discord while being far superior for privacy and openness. It's federated so you're not locked in to anything, and while it's not as good as Discord (yet) in some ways, I like it better in others, and it's a good trade-off for me. XMPP is possibly more private, but it's a bit more complicated and the clients aren't anywhere near as good.

 

Guilded shows promise and is very similar to Discord, and I've seen many people saying it's better in most ways, but unfortunately I didn't get far enough to find out because even the most basic function, adding friends, is nowhere near as easy as Discord or even XMPP and it just isn't as user-friendly as you'd expect for how similar it is to Discord. It's also closed-source, so has the same potential as Discord in that regard and may end up just being the new Discord that needs to be abandoned for something better in a few years.

 

Revolt looks really promising, as it looks to be just a Discord clone, but it doesn't actually work. I think the dev is doing a full rewrite of it, so time will tell what happens there. Still not as good as XMPP, since it's a single client and it's centralized, but if it gets to a working state, it would potentially be a great alternative for those really set on Discord's UI/UX, especially if it could be bridged better than Discord currently can, which seems likely since it's open.

 

Finally, qTox is a very basic application that doesn't look as nice or have as many features, but is fairly simple and seems to work well for basic voice chat.

[Kisai]

14 minutes ago, vertigo220 said:

 

 

So my recommendation is to just ditch it if possible and move to another service.

That's working, OH so well for Twitter right now. You can't heard cats, you can only chase them away until they find someone else.

 

The thing with Discord, is it offers the  primary use (discord voice chat in real time) that prior tools including Skype offered, and the only reason it got so popular is because "Everyone" was using it that they had to too. Like good grief, if I had to pay for discord to use any of it's services, it would be gone pretty darn quick, same with twitter.

 

In effect, only succeeds because the right services are no-cost to the user (text, voice and video group chats.) But saying "just use something else" won't happen short of a "better" service coming along, and we all know any venture-capital backed service will ultimately suck in a few years when they try to monetize it, so why bother.

 

[WhitetailAni]

On 2/2/2023 at 2:20 PM, vertigo220 said:

moderators abusing their power, including selectively choosing what content is allowed while banning for similar content and allowing CP and grooming to occur.

This isn't unique to Discord. You can find this pretty much everywhere online.

[vertigo220]

8 hours ago, FakeKGB said:

This isn't unique to Discord. You can find this pretty much everywhere online.

And? I realize that, and I don't patronize sites and services like that as much as possible. Just because it's common doesn't make it any less wrong or worthy of ditching especially when there are better alternatives that don't do these things. Comments and attitudes like this aren't helpful at all, and are why these companies feel they can do whatever they want. If you're fine with that kind of behavior, as well as all the other crap, by all means continue using them. I'm not trying to convince people that are ok with it to switch, as that would be a waste of time; I'm just trying to make people aware so if they do care they know there are other options.

[Deadpool2onBlu-Ray]

On 2/1/2023 at 5:38 PM, ouroesa said:

 

Summary

If you frequently leave Discord open on your desktop and have recently noticed degraded game performance from your Nvidia GPU, a Discord glitch might be the culprit. Nvidia will release a fix soon, but also offers directions for manually rectifying the problem.

 

Quotes

 

My thoughts

This is unfortunate but at least not a big deal. I’ve tested this with and RTX 4000 series but don't seem to be affected. My suspicion is because I use MSI afterburner with manual overclocks/undervolt. I did try 'resetting' values to default in MSI Afterburner but memory frequency still did not lower when opening Discord (joined voice channels, streamed my monitor etc).

 

For those having the issue, most suggest using GeForce 3D Profile Manager and change the Discord profile. Would be interested to see if just installing MSI Afterburner also fixes the problem since I'm not affected.

 

Sources

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/discord-throttles-nvidia-gpu-memory-clock-speeds#xenforo-comments-3794740

https://www.techspot.com/news/97449-discord-might-throttling-nvidia-gpu-memory.html

I feel like Discord slows down my machine a fair bit, and I have a very powerful PC

[Godlygamer23]

On 2/2/2023 at 12:57 AM, Kisai said:

The Steam client, and other Electron/nw.js/Chromium based apps do the same. When the video drivers are reinstalled, the app is just screwy that you have to ctrl-alt-del to close it, because you can't actually get to the exit button or navigate the menu with the keyboard to do so.

When updating graphics drivers, I close out as much as possible before proceeding to prevent any sort of problems from occurring.