frame drops when having Netflix open

1

Hi there,

I have encountered a weird issue. My game is dropping frames (from 60fps to 55 to 60 to 50 and so on) with visible micro stutters.
The thing is, it is only occuring if I have running Netflix on my second screen at the same time.

It does not make a difference if there are 100 animated objects on the screen additionally or not. As soon as I close the browser tab with the video the stuttering is gone. Tested with Google Chrome and MS Edge.

Is MonoGame (an OpenGL project in my case) and the browser using the same ressources somewhere maybe?

2

iGPU? and are you not looking at Task Manager for resources?

3

image.png738Ɨ116 12.8 KB

GPU is a GTX 1070, and I can play any AAA game during Netflix. There is basically no load on the harware, so I guess it must be some software issue? No?

4

Are you on Windows 8? you need to update your OS, not seen Task Manager like that for some months nowā€¦

Is your app a Desktop App?

EDIT

Try running it as a DirectX app and see if it still happensā€¦

Also, what CPU have you got?

5

Itā€™s the default Win10 task manager ^^
CPU is i7 4790k

Its a OpenGL Project (MonoGame Cross Platform Desktop Project to be precise)
Tested it with DirectX. Same issue.

6

I have the same problem. 4790k 16gb ram and 1070. The game can be running at 600fps and with netflix open every second or so get major frame stutters.

Closing netflix is an instant fix

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7

Browsers use Hardware Acceleration (for video decoding), so they are using your GPU.

You can turn that off in Browser Options or - maybe - send their workload to the internal GPU instead (if you have one)

(well, I donā€™t know, why itā€™s not noticeable with AAA games ā€¦ maybe they use triple buffering or some other techniques to ā€˜hideā€™ the stutter)

8

Is there an ā€œin-engineā€ solution for that?

9

I donā€™t think there is an easy solution to this - if you search the internet youā€™ll find the same issue with many other games (including Unity games). There may be advanced techniques to overcome the framedrop (adaptive FPS, triple buffering) but in the end youā€™re still sharing the resources of the GPU with the netflix stream decoding. You canā€™t stop it from doing so inside your game :slight_smile:

Also be aware that nowadays there are some AAA games which were developed Console-First and therefore run at 30 FPS (gamers dislike that fact but itā€™s less prone to framedrop)

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