Render lag on other programs while gaming on Windows 11

[MikaloWOW]

Hopefully this is the best section for this. I recently built a new computer and installed windows 11 on it. Since I use this for work, gaming, and streaming, I went a little higher on the specs. However, when I try to stream games, I noticed I get rendering lag on any software outside of the game. So, the streaming software itself feels sluggish. While the game runs smooth and the stream video itself seems fine, the issue is that anytime one of my alerts tries to play, it doesn't render. So I hear the audio but don't ever see the alert render on the stream. This happens on pretty much all triple A titles or high end games, but I never had this issue on my Windows 10 machine. So I assume it's a settings in Windows 11?

I did some poking around and found one suggestion that said to turn off Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling, but this didn't seem to make a difference. Otherwise, I haven't found much else to suggest settings to turn off or on.

Thanks for any help provided.

Some PC specs
13900k
3080TI

64GB ram

[Mark Kaine]

18 hours ago, MikaloWOW said:

However, when I try to stream games, I noticed I get rendering lag on any software outside of the game

This is actually normal behavior  - depending on how demanding the game actually is... (having a hard time to believe someone who apparently built their own pc? wouldn't know this)

 

 

Yes, you can do "multitasking" but its indeed limited by your hardware ultimately. 

[porina]

4 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

Yes, you can do "multitasking" but its indeed limited by your hardware ultimately. 

OP said this was fine in Win10 and only got bad in Win11. While hardware changed also, it's a high end system.

 

I'm watching in case of interesting comments as I came across similar but not identical problems before. In my case it was Win10, FFXIV would have stream lag sometimes, and monitoring stream on same PC always lagged behind. This is an older game that doesn't use a ton of cores, and I have 12 cores so it wasn't running out of CPU. Something else is limiting and I never figured it out. The only workaround I found was that if I stream at 30fps instead of 60fps, the stream problem goes away but the stream monitor lag remains. I can stream other games at 60fps no problem. I also have a vtuber model running on same system, and depending on which order I start the software, I can get weird lag in FFXIV. I'm fairly certain in my case it is a title related problem.

 

When I asked, I was given theories about the GPU encoder overloading but that didn't seem applicable. Maybe it is some kind of GPU choke point? But monitoring didn't reveal anything. I didn't try it then, but now I think more about it, I wonder if increasing the process priority of the streaming software (I used OBS) might help. Otherwise it could be brute forced by using a 2 PC streaming setup. I never tried that since my capture device is HDMI and I have to run DP for my G-sync display.

[Mark Kaine]

15 minutes ago, porina said:

OP said this was fine in Win10 and only got bad in Win11. While hardware changed also, it's a high end system.

Still, what i said isn't wrong either,  at some point this *is* normal and we don't really know what applications and if really everything is the same (except hw and new OS)

 

There does seem to be a hardware limitation however (or some kind of misconfiguration) but windows isn't that great at multitasking simply, thats why you generally want to have as little programs running while gaming. No?

 

ps: obs is great and all, but there's always some occasional lag going on, i don't have this issue with Shadowplay at all (but Shadowplay doesn't record in HDR for some reason,  which sucks, because OW is about the only game where i like the HDR implementation...)

[MikaloWOW]

I've never experienced render lag on programs outside of the game before. Yes, you might on sometimes see a small bit of lag, but not to the extent I'm seeing. The streaming software always rendered correctly and my alerts always displayed no matter what game I was playing. Now, a game like Last of Us was badly optimized, so I blamed that originally, but they did a bunch of patches and I still had issues. But then when I loaded up RE4 remake, I noticed it wasn't using anywhere near my max resources, and still the render lag existed on other programs. If this isn't a common issue, then it might not be Windows 11 alone, but something with Windows 11 and my hardware perhaps.

The one video I found on youtube so far mentioned HAGS vs running OBS as admin. So I've been playing with that, but it didn't seem to change anything so far. But, he does mention in the video that for him it helped with render lag.

The games themselves are being run with the same settings on the new machine vs the old one, so I wasn't expecting any change in behavior, honestly.

[porina]

58 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

There does seem to be a hardware limitation however (or some kind of misconfiguration) but windows isn't that great at multitasking simply, thats why you generally want to have as little programs running while gaming. No?

It was fine before, it isn't fine now. It can work. Something changed. Saying Windows sucks or it is a non-specific hardware limitation doesn't help find a solution.

 

31 minutes ago, MikaloWOW said:

The one video I found on youtube so far mentioned HAGS vs running OBS as admin. So I've been playing with that, but it didn't seem to change anything so far. But, he does mention in the video that for him it helped with render lag.

For one game I found I had to run OBS as admin, as otherwise I only got a black capture screen. Haven't noticed any performance difference otherwise. I still wonder if it is worth trying to increase the priority of OBS (via task manager) and see if that helps.

 

I'm taking a pause from streaming, but I'm looking at returning in the future with a new vtuber model. I have changed to Win11 since then, so it'll be interesting if I notice any perf differences when I do.

[Mark Kaine]

44 minutes ago, MikaloWOW said:

I've never experienced render lag on programs outside of the game before. Yes, you might on sometimes see a small bit of lag, but not to the extent I'm seeing. The streaming software always rendered correctly and my alerts always displayed no matter what game I was playing. Now, a game like Last of Us was badly optimized, so I blamed that originally, but they did a bunch of patches and I still had issues. But then when I loaded up RE4 remake, I noticed it wasn't using anywhere near my max resources, and still the render lag existed on other programs. If this isn't a common issue, then it might not be Windows 11 alone, but something with Windows 11 and my hardware perhaps.

The one video I found on youtube so far mentioned HAGS vs running OBS as admin. So I've been playing with that, but it didn't seem to change anything so far. But, he does mention in the video that for him it helped with render lag.

The games themselves are being run with the same settings on the new machine vs the old one, so I wasn't expecting any change in behavior, honestly.

you could try running win 10? i mean at this point its usual troubleshooting and if it was me Id go back to w10 ASAP, if you still have these issues we'd know it wasn't actually w11 and the search continues,  but to me it seems almost obvious that its something with the OS (unless the hw is defective) point is u gotta start somewhere and installing w10 is easy.