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

https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5443/~/when-discord-is-open-in-the-background%2C-graphics-card-memory-clocks-will-not

by kjhughes • 3 years ago

235 224 3 years ago

nvidia.custhelp.com

snake_plissken2• 3 years ago

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 experimented with things by closing different sets of applications and then trying to connect to a DayZ server. They finally figured out it was Discord that was causing the issue.

brianshaler• 3 years ago

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?

snake_plissken2• 3 years ago

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.

yamtaddle7• 3 years ago

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 battery-powered device saw their battery life cut to a sliver of what it should be. To make matters worse, nearly every session saw at least one person's Discord simply crash and have to restart. What is this, the 1990s?

I was video-chatting in goddamn 2002 on a potato. Yeah the resolution was ass, but it's not like this is some totally new, hyper-advanced tech. It should have gotten far more power efficient! Look how great codecs are now! Video chat shouldn't burn my battery like I'm having it calculate digits of Pi in a hot loop on 20 threads plus a hundred graphics-chip threads.

est313• 3 years ago

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.

xeromal• 3 years ago

Howdie fellow DayZ brother.

jeoqn• 3 years ago

If I had to guess I’d say discord attaches to the dayz executable to show the discord overlay in-game and the dayz anti cheat doesn’t like it when processes get attached to the game because that’s how cheats work and doesn’t let you auth into the online game.

Aachen4• 3 years ago

Does dayz use DRM? My first thought is that they've got a false positive in their lie detector rather than that the Discord client somehow reaches into dayz and causes it to give "authentication state" errors.

Note that you can also use Discord just as a browser tab, dunno what the difference is with having a client as I've only ever used the browser version (and I bet the client is electron aka outdated browser under the hood anyway).

explaingarlic• 3 years ago

Anything that injects DLLs and hooks into lib functions will have this effect on unstable software that was not written with a comprehensive understanding of how the majority of Windows programs operate. It's not Discord's fault that they are using the APIs provided to them by Microsoft fairly, legally, cleanly and non-intrusively and not everyone supports them.

Maybe it's the assumption that legitimate/good-will programs do not interact that causes this issue. It's ridiculous, and untrue. I don't really use Discord and I have a strong distaste for the kinds of social circles that it breeds, but it is a technically excellent product.

If someone wants to see an example of a triple-A game product that is built with this kind-of misunderstanding of the NT kernel and Windows operating system (and shell, and their own compiler toolchain... Oh my...), here lies a funny video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8xtw54-lCI

MaxikCZ2• 3 years ago

and I have a strong distaste for the kinds of social circles that it breeds

This feels like "dog bit me once, so now I will hate all the dogs".

Discord is a platform for comunities, and its your choice to choose amongst them. Many of such are of superb quality you cant find anywhere else. The key is in moderation.

miga• 3 years ago

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 logs make machine non-functional (got 500GB.)

* blocking other programs using desktop integration for file dialogs: latency of several minutes, sometimes dialogs never appear.

Discord is as dodgy app as can be. Hope we will not find it is actually another distribution of spyware.

Since programs with so many bugs and crashes are frequently prone to security issues, I recommend to replace Discord with another app that allows push-to-talk.

ChuckNorris894• 3 years ago

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?

yamtaddle7• 3 years ago

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.

deathanatos3• 3 years ago

I don't knit, but none of those do what Discord does, really: effective group chat + in game voice. Skype is sort of is in that direction, but Discord's UX nails it for in-game chat whereas Skype's did not. (Though it has been a while since I ran Skype for more than "oh, that's the only medium that party supports? I guess if we have to…")

I do feel that these apps these days, Discord included, eat a ton of resources, and that it feels like a regression.

Zetobal2• 3 years ago

ripcord is basically what you are looking for it works with slack and discord.

PathOfEclipse• 3 years ago

We went wrong with Electron in particular: https://www.electronjs.org/. I am convinced this framework alone is responsible for more performance loss on the desktop than any other single thing.

dmonitor• 3 years ago

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

OkayPhysicist4• 3 years ago

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 discovered something else Skype had sucked at: audio quality. Mumble took less bandwidth and less system resources, while sounding like someone actually sitting in the room with you (at least to our phone-and-skype adjusted ears).

rob74• 3 years ago

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

SSLy3• 3 years ago

That, or use armcord if you want something that lives outside the browser session.

Zetobal2• 3 years ago

I use ripcord for discord and slack bonus it's a native app and uses about 20mb of ram.

anon7919• 3 years ago

... and/or use an irc gateway (like bitlbee) if it suits your needs.

saghm2• 3 years ago

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 a lot of potential use cases, like gaming), but if I remember correctly from trying this out once, you can have even more jarring bugs like "alt-tab over to the browser to hit push-to-talk shortcut, hit the shortcut, alt-tab back before releasing so you can keep talking, and then having the push to talk never deactivate because the browser didn't detect the key-up event due to a different window having focus when it happened".

belltaco• 3 years ago

attempt to `ptrace` processes all the time;

Isn't that for showing what game you're running as your status? If you turn that feature off it should stop doing that.

capableweb2• 3 years ago

Couldn't you do that by just scanning `px aux` or even just `/proc` rather than running a tool that is meant for observing and control the execution of other processes? A simple name matching should be enough, rather than digging into the execution of the process itself.

bob10295• 3 years ago

> 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.

causi• 3 years ago

Mumble is a much better experience than Teamspeak, at least in my experience.

foepys• 3 years ago

TeamSpeak 5 is currently in beta and attempts to bring a Discord-like experience to any TeamSpeak server.

TS3 already had a lot of features like file uploads, rich text chat, avatars, and much more, and as far as I know TS5 is mostly a reskin using the existing technology of TS3.

Laaas• 3 years ago

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

KyleSanderson• 3 years ago

Discord has supported Push to Talk since 2016 (on Windows atleast), if not earlier...

WheatMillington• 3 years ago

Me and my friends started using discord early in its life. It was a joy to get away from Skype, google meet, etc. It was such an elegant solution. Sadly it has become a gigantic, bloated, buggy mess trying to do absolutely everything. I hate it. Can anyone recommend a better solution?

Insanity• 3 years ago

To pile on (somewhat). I've been enjoying using discord for the chat features. We just have one channel that I use with long-time friends to chat. Recently, we started playing games together (cross play), and Voice Chat _usually_ doesn't work well on the Xbox. I'm not sure if it's an Xbox or Discord issue though, as I'm the only PC gamer and don't have access to an Xbox to debug it :-)

UI_at_80x242• 3 years ago

mumble

The stand-alone server is small, and efficient. There are countless clients that will work with it. I've run it on Linux & FreeBSD systems.

unethical_ban3• 3 years ago

I used to use Mumble. I still think decentralized, encrypted chat is great. But there is nothing like Discord for free.

If Mumble could do streaming/video and rich text support, I think people could be peeled off Discord a tad.

But I don't know what you're talking about regarding buggy. Discord runs pretty much perfectly for me, excepting one issue (it was either Discord or Corsair Wave) that was giving fuzzy audio with a particular virtual audio input.

For how complex the server/channel/DM/text chat/"voice channel" text chat schema is, I think it's a pretty impressive product.

questiond• 3 years ago

https://tavrn.gg/ maybe?

Animats• 3 years ago

Good argument to run Discord in the browser instead.

"Discord is worse with the app".

p1necone• 3 years ago

Discord tries to track which other programs you run by default and shares it.

You might not want it, but it's not like this is unexpected behaviour. Tracking the currently running game and sharing that information with your friends is an intentional, advertised feature.

zeta0134• 3 years ago

I wouldn't mind this feature so much if it were optional. However, while it's possible to disable the sharing of the information, as far as I'm aware the only way to stop Discord from being able to probe the running processes (so it can display them in the corner to the user) is to run it in a web browser. As such, the desktop apps do not get to run on my machines.

nextaccountic2• 3 years ago

* attempt to ptrace processes all the time;

There are Discord employees on the thread so I gotta ask.. what's the justification on this one?

Shit like this makes open sourcing the client a must for me

charcircuit3• 3 years ago

Shit like this makes open sourcing the client a must for me

The client is written in javascript. It's not hard to go look at the source.

stusmall• 3 years ago

* attempt to `ptrace` processes all the time;

This is the one that got it removed from my machine. It runs just fine in the browser so I do that. The feature I lose are ones I don't want anyways.

sdnas211• 3 years ago

* blocking other programs using desktop integration for file dialogs: latency of several minutes, sometimes dialogs never appear.

That's a Chrome/Chromium thing. Often, if I try to open the Nvidia control panel, it will not appear until I close Chrome. I've had something similar happen with rpcs3 (a ps3 emulator) - only with that, it wouldn't start compiling shaders until Chrome was closed. They continued just fine after reopening it.

deathanatos3• 3 years ago

Interesting. I discovered just the other night that merely minimizing Discord nets me about a 20 FPS improvement in Factorio. (Even if Discord is otherwise off-screen, which it normally is, as Factorio is fullscreen, and there's no second monitor for me.)

SSLy3• 3 years ago

I'd assume it's their State of the Art™ React® frontend that's hammering your L3 cache with constant updates.

deathanatos3• 3 years ago

I'd like to assume that too, frankly. But I actually think it's slightly more complex. I've got CPU time to spare, as it is, and Factorio gets a solid 60 UPS. (I.e., the game simulation proceeds without lag¹.) It's the FPS that isn't there, and I think it's mostly constrained on GPU time…? But I'm really not entirely sure where the bottleneck is. (I also don't think the NVIDIA reports Discord as being on the GPU, too, so … IDK. 20 FPS is a stark, hard to miss difference.)

¹(usually…)

nightski2• 3 years ago

It's a lot more likely to be the overlay imho.

speps• 3 years ago

So you were at 0 FPS and now at 20 FPS? Using FPS for performance without giving the before/after numbers is useless...

Aachen4• 3 years ago

Not really. It just has to draw what's on the screen, which for an average base is estimable. Whether that's 40 to 60 or 140 to 160 fps doesn't really matter: it's a significant difference and I think probably absolute if you know how many flops or whatever you need per frame at a certain graphics settings level.

Not that I'd argue for making one Factorio frame a unit of measurement, to be fair; I just don't think the remark was useless.

loa_in_2• 3 years ago

I suspect all the GIFs and animated profile pictures etc.

art0rz• 3 years ago

Unlike Slack, discord actually pauses them when the window is not focused.

NeveHanter• 3 years ago

Same on my ArchLinux setup with RTX 2080 SUPER and nvidia drivers, Factorio at some point starts limiting to 30 fps (from 60), alt tab doesn't help, minimize/maximize too, but the moment I kill discord from the tray everything gets back to normal, the same in some other games I can't recall now

i386• 3 years ago

Turn off “hardware acceleration” in discord settings. It’s a huge GPU hog.

jaimehrubiks• 3 years ago

It would be nice to know if turning this off solves OP and other related issues.

MaxikCZ2• 3 years ago

Wont it just become huge CPU hog?

kibwen2• 3 years ago

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.

wjamesg• 3 years ago

Likewise, highly recommended

bob10295• 3 years ago

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

In 2023, what app experience is still impossible to do in the browser?

The only things I can come up with are apps requiring access to outside hardware or files. There are now several entirely unique ways in which a AAA gaming experience could be delivered to a client browser. If we can ship resident evil frames to a Chromebook at 30+fps, is there anything we can't do?

anonymousab• 3 years ago

I believe the discord app has some weird limitations around global shortcuts and push-to-talk when you use the browser tab instead of the desktop app.

One use case also used to be that you would use a browser tab for one discord account and the desktop app for another, but container tabs + browser profile switching made that less necessary. And then discord eventually added support for multiple accounts.

Xorlev• 3 years ago

The only things I can come up with are apps requiring access to outside hardware or files

That's not even 100% true either [1]. For instance, you can flash Android devices from the browser. The example in [2] talks to an attached Arduino device.

[1] https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/12576972

[2] https://developer.chrome.com/articles/usb/

OkayPhysicist4• 3 years ago

Discord optimizes streaming your gameplay by injecting DLLs into your game when you go to stream it (I discovered this, and the setting to disable it, after trying to figure out how the hell Puzzle Pirates could crash due to being streamed). I would be very. Very, very surprised to learn a website could do that. Hell, any streaming of whatever separate application you're running seems like it shouldn't be possible from a website.

toast0• 3 years ago

The two things I can think of are:

a) communication protocols that aren't encapsulated in http(s), websockets, or webrtc. There's good reasons for some of this, and it's not that limiting, since popular protocols tend to grow some of these encapsulations to circumvent lazy firewalls, but it sticks out to me. Additionally, a page/app can't run a server for other browsers to connect to, it's got to be intermediated with a separate server; it would be difficult to make an offline LAN multiplayer game work.

b) reliable non-interactive push messaging and/or background connectivity. Again, there's good reasons, and you wouldn't like every page/app to have this capability, but this capability enables good offline usability by fetching data when available and pushing user driven updates when available.

For example, Email should be offline capable, and it should have nearly all the messages that were available when last the device had connectivity, and it should let me compose new messages and replies and queue them until connectivity returns. Maybe it should even speak IMAP and SMTP, but JMAP is probably good enough and browser accessible. Same with other messaging systems, assuming they have queued messages and aren't online only.

criddell5• 3 years ago

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, memory, battery, and bandwidth.

kibwen2• 3 years ago

Of the two major mobile OSes, one is literally owned by an ad company and the other is increasingly succumbing to the dark side of advertising. Why would I trust Apple not to do nefarious things with all the tracking they do ("privacy" my ass) when I could just use a browser with an adblocker and do even better?

rcoveson• 3 years ago

The web has tracking everywhere and often uses a lot of CPU, memory, battery, and bandwidth.

The alternative to using something like Discord on the web is not a well-optimized desktop app that is somehow more respectful w.r.t. tracking than the web version. Same goes for Slack, Zoom, etc. It will still use lots of CPU and memory, and now in addition to tracking you with the techniques available to it in the browser sandbox, it will gleefully list the processes running on your machine, rifle through your files, try to get itself to start up automatically on login, try to get it so that when you "close" it it's still running in the system tray, and generally just make itself at home.

Desktop apps written by devs who first learned to write desktop apps are better than web apps. Desktop apps written by web developers are like demons that have broken through the summoning circle. The browser sandbox doesn't protect you from fingerprinting techniques and the ensuing tracking, but it protects you from a whole lot of other stuff. Take away the sandbox and the shameless data vampires get anything they want.

throwaway092232• 3 years ago

Webapps have better privacy protections than native. Battery/cpu is a tossup depending on the app. With the example above of chat apps I've found that the webapps use less cpu/memory.

I think you're correct that desktop operating systems are in sore need of a permissions model for non-free apps. It should be possible to build one, and then shame vendors into using it.

doix• 3 years ago

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.

graphe• 3 years ago

This is an electron app that uses more ram and tracks you more, and the Linux version is worst than the website.

If you think websites track you, why wouldn't the app made by the company that adds the tracking on your browser ignore tracking you with their app?

WirelessGigabit2• 3 years ago

I’ll use it for the increased privacy protections

Negative. It's actually the other way around. A browser is more controllable, especially with extensions.

An application in a browser cannot do certificate pinning preventing you from inspecting SSL traffic. Nor can you have uBlock origin running for your Discord app.

super2562• 3 years ago

If you'd rather use a native application, I can recommend Ripcord[1]. Ripcord is an alternative client. Unfortunately, the developer doesn't seem to make many sales, so some features are not implemented.

The demo has infinite days, but it's a good idea to actually donate if you like the project :)

[1] https://cancel.fm/ripcord/

viraptor2• 3 years ago

Watch out with Discord and 3rd party clients. Their policies suck here and people have been banned for it already https://twitter.com/discord/status/1229357198918197248

dncornholio• 3 years ago

Discord is a fucking bitch.. Find Something interesting, you have to join some Discord to find all the information. So you join the Discord and then you have 100s of channels with chat.. Try to find the information, need a role, I give up. It's almost angering me how terrible this program is, seeing so many people use it. It currently is being abused.

Please use Discord for chat, but don't use it as your main platform, please! Rant over.

loa_in_2• 3 years ago

It's absolutely great for moderators and server owners though. Also color coding user names is surprisingly good to enrich communication on public channels. I guess that goes for personalisation in general but think is simple and very effective. Channel separation and hiding and other permissions are doing great service to reduce clutter, it's a trade off I guess.

Muehe• 3 years ago

So you join the Discord and then you have 100s of channels with chat.. Try to find the information, need a role, I give up.

I know where you are coming from here, but that's not really on Discord, but on individual server management. The people who organise their Discord servers like that would probably have created a similar mess in ye olde forum times, or on Slack or whatever. Plus bigger servers tend to be subject to SPAM and scamming and counter-measures seem ad-hoc at times because native tools for handling that are a relatively recent addition.

And for all its faults (not open source, slow, privacy concerns, OP, etc.) Discord also has some things going for it. Lots of people are already on it so network effect is a thing here, it's relatively easy to pick up the basics off and there are no immediate paywalls (which makes it attractive to semi-public projects without a cash flow), a lot of basic and advanced features are there to use, and most of them work across a lot of platforms.

My biggest gripe with it (besides the aforementioned) is that its better new features like forum channels and stage channels are locked behind usage metrics and/or paywalls.

cordobaplaza• 3 years ago

should I switch to using the browser version instead?

nerdjon2• 3 years ago

I really have a love hate relationship with discord and I feel like it is a prime example of an application that should be "simple" but just seems far more complicated than it should be.

Currently my biggest annoyance is for some reason every time I start a game, it also tries to access my Camera. Some people online are saying that it is because my webcam has a mic... but why is it trying to access my mic when I launch a game and discord is just sitting in the background?!?

But at the same time I have a lot of friends and groups I game with on it, sometimes in voice chat. The convenience of it is really nice.

charcircuit3• 3 years ago

Do you have the discord overlay enabled?

nerdjon2• 3 years ago

It looks like it is, I will try disabling it.

Not really sure why the overlay would be trying to access my webcam or my microphone either though. But I also never use it and not sure why its enabled.

jokoon• 3 years ago

probably some bitcoin mining worm?

rideontime• 3 years ago

Probably not.

thewebcount2• 3 years ago

I can't believe in this day and age there are still solutions like this. This is reminiscent of having to manually set IRQ settings to get games to play properly and is one of the reasons I stopped using Windows decades ago. This is giving me PTSD flashbacks.

jhgg2• 3 years ago

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 caused.

snet0• 3 years ago

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

jhgg2• 3 years ago

Correct.

calimariae• 3 years ago

I demand reimbursement for my dropped frames!

andrewmcwatters• 3 years ago

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!

icodestuff• 3 years ago

Is this also why Hades has been lagging, dropping frames, and running at a much lower framerate for months while Discord app DMs (and only DMs) are open?

hacoo• 3 years ago

Not likely, the reduction in memory clock speed is pretty small (I think only 6800 vs 7000 mhz)

ysleepy• 3 years ago

Can you have a look on how the web ui does the typing indicator animation? I really need an engineer to know what is happening there, why is it animating an svg in the dom by looping in Javascript, instead of just using a gif? This is destroying the battery by pegging a cpu core on firefox.

At least this has been the case last time I checked. And there is no way to disable the animation.

Const-me2• 3 years ago

the process of probing the GPU for what codecs it supports

I think you can ask that question to Windows, instead of probing. Call MFTEnumEx API function with MFT_CATEGORY_VIDEO_ENCODER category, MFT_ENUM_FLAG_HARDWARE | MFT_ENUM_FLAG_TRANSCODE_ONLY flags, and MFVideoFormat_AV1 in the output video subtype.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/mfapi/nf...

WirelessGigabit2• 3 years ago

I agree with your statement, but I understand why you'd want to probe. It's cross-platform, and it's more reliable... (unless you run into a driver bug).

The function you linked to queries the registry, and that on its own can be invalid information. How does that info get there?

It ultimately reminds me of this article:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040211-00/?p=40...

ForOldHack• 3 years ago

I am on an older 970m. There are no driver updates. Can you have a probe-less version out? or

Is this related to a view port bug of Windows, and non-alignment?

mox1• 3 years ago

PrpTip: Use discord in your browser.

I use it for gaming, with voice chat. Works fine. The only downside is that your voice chat audio will output to whatever channel your browser audio is set to.

Edit: also push to talk wont work, but it will pickup the microphone audio while inside a game. Set the threshold high or use the mute button on the microphone.

So if you have a headset and want voice chat to go through that, make sure to set that to the default audio channel in your OS before you join the voice chat.

Inputs (microphone) have no such restrictions.

Other than that gotcha, its about 1000% better than running a huge bloated electron App.

dbg31415• 3 years ago

Can you still use push to talk via browser? Do you get an overlay showing who is speaking?

nickphx• 3 years ago

Nothing like scope creep on a simple chat app to turn into to a bloated beast of uselessness that impacts system usability.

kefka_p3• 3 years ago

I must be having a hard time waking up today, or something, because I can’t wrap my brain around why a chat app would need 3D acceleration.

The first chat sites on the web e.g. Bianca’s, Poolside, and Talker were built using more primitive versions of the same interface tools used by electron and while they didn’t have the functionality of video and audio chats, they also didn’t break your GPU driver.

I miss the Unix philosophy at times.

seanhunter2• 3 years ago

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.

kefka_p3• 3 years ago

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 and snowball effect of previous products.

I would probably hold their software in higher regard if it wasn’t just one monolithic multi-tool. They don’t even have to push multiple apps, but could use a modular architecture at the app level with plug-ins to support non-core functionality.

justnotworthit• 3 years ago

It uses the GPU for the UI as well. Says so right in the settings. Sometimes I see using the GPU in task manager, sometimes not.

nubinetwork• 3 years ago

Its interesting that the temporary fix for this is to generate some file, edit it, and import it back in... What else goes into this file, and why?

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

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