Nvidia GPUs hit by mysterious Discord bug that slows frame rates

Date:
Wed, 01 Feb 2023 12:12:48 +0000

Description:
Use Discord for your gaming chats? Then you need to know about this very odd bug.

FULL STORY ======================================================================

Nvidia GPUs are being messed with by the popular group chat app Discord ,
with gamers seeing the clock speeds of their graphics card memory running at reduced frequencies.

Toms Hardware reports that the latest update for Discord is throttling the clock speed of the cards video RAM, meaning slower overall performance when the app is running in the background and youre playing a game (or doing anything graphics-related for that matter).

Nvidia highlighted the problem itself AMD or Intel graphics cards arent affected but the company didnt say which models are hit by the slowdown, which leads us to assume that its likely all models.

The only commonality between affected graphics cards is that the system
theyre in is running the latest version of Discord (Nvidia doesnt mention if the graphics driver version has any bearing on the situation, either).

Nvidia is going to make an update available for its GPUs that will solve this rather odd issue, but in the meantime, Team Green also shared a workaround in a customer support post, which you can follow here (although its a slightly clunky band-aid). Analysis: An odd bug, for sure but it may not have all
that much impact

This is certainly an odd one, and were not really told anything by Nvidia about what might be causing the problem. Toms Hardware theorizes that Discord has just enabled AV1 support for Nvidia RTX 4000 GPUs, so the glitch could be wrapped up in the code to do with that.

Of course, the situation could be worse the clock frequencies of the GPU itself couldve been affected. And the presence of a workaround, and a
solution incoming, is also good to hear.

Just last night we were using Discord to chat with family while playing Sea
of Thieves, and we have to say, we didnt notice any slowdown on the high seas (using an Nvidia GPU, an RTX 2060 Super to be precise).

Its not clear how much VRAM clocks are slowed by, Nvidia just says that they wont reach full speed. From what we can see online, reports (like this Reddit thread) indicate a varying clock speed loss of anything from 75MHz up to 250MHz, which as suggested would not have much of an effect at all on your gaming experience (bearing in mind this is memory speed, not the GPU).

Anecdotally, some folks have observed games crashing, though, and its always possible some GPUs will be hit a fair bit harder than others with greater
VRAM slowdown and any loss of frames, even a slight one, isnt good news, naturally.



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/news/nvidia-gpus-hit-by-mysterious-discord-bug-that- slows-frame-rates


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