YT Frame Drops if you have Background Application Max Frame Rate enabled in NVIDIA

AFilthyLeaf

Description

If you have the Background Application Max Frame Rate enabled in your NVIDIA control panel it causes frame drops during YouTube video playback on Vivaldi. You can resolve the frame drops by either changing the global or application specific settings in NVIDIA control panel, or by disabling Hardware Acceleration, though disabling hardware acceleration obviously hurts Vivaldi's performance.

This does not occur in Chrome, Firefox, or Edge which leads me to believe it is a bug.

Steps to Reproduce

Enable Background Application Max Frame Rate in your NVIDIA Control Panel (either for Vivaldi or globally), I had mine set to 30. Apply and Re-Open Vivaldi.
Open up any YouTube video.
Confirm with "Stats for Nerds" information

Actual result:

Lots of dropped frames.

Expected result:

Normal playback as happens in Edge, Chrome and Firefox.

Pathduck

@AFilthyLeaf Hello and Welcome to the Vivaldi Community

Many reports on the forum about this:
https://forum.vivaldi.net/post/658558
https://forum.vivaldi.net/post/523320
https://forum.vivaldi.net/post/450754

Now I do not know why Vivaldi would react to this setting even if running in the foreground. Maybe it deserves a proper bug report, apparently none of the others actually took the time to make a bug report.
https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/troubleshoot/reporting-a-bug-in-vivaldi/

I did a quick test here on my RTX3070, Win10 x64 and it does indeed drop performance heavily.

Note that it's come to light recently that the GPU vendors add specific GPU driver overrides to their drivers for processes named chrome.exe , msedge.exe, firefox.exe and so on. But Vivaldi is a small browser and the vendors do not care.

A solution would be to create a new profile for Vivaldi and set the Background frame rate setting to Off.
Probably an even better solution is to simply set the Global setting to the NVidia recommended setting: Off.

I'm always curious about these things - why do people enable this setting?
Is it because they've read some advice that this setting has an effect on game performance or something like that? It just seems a very strange thing to mess around with unless the user is really sure what the setting does.

AFilthyLeaf

@Pathduck Just wanted to say you were spot on with the overrides, this issue effects Brave as well. Perhaps this is something only NVIDIA can resolve...

Pathduck

@AFilthyLeaf said in YT Frame Drops if you have Background Application Max Frame Rate enabled in NVIDIA:

Just wanted to say you were spot on with the overrides, this issue effects Brave as well. Perhaps this is something only NVIDIA can resolve...

Well, the strange thing is that while there exists profiles for Chrome, Firefox, Edge they all have that setting set to the Global value - i.e. if you change it globally it should also affect these browsers. So something deeper is going on here, possibly undocumented performance tweaks the GPU vendors do for known browsers. See:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/12zho7u/amd_drivers_allegedly_have_hardcoded/
https://www.neowin.net/news/yandex-alleges-amds-windows-drivers-unfairly-favor-google-chrome-microsoft-edge/

Just for fun I'm going to rename Vivaldi to chrome.exe and see if it happens

AFilthyLeaf

@Pathduck said in YT Frame Drops if you have Background Application Max Frame Rate enabled in NVIDIA:

Probably an even better solution is to simply set the Global setting to the NVidia recommended setting: Off.

I'm always curious about these things - why do people enable this setting?
Is it because they've read some advice that this setting has an effect on game performance or something like that? It just seems a very strange thing to mess around with unless the user is really sure what the setting does.

The setting is useful for me when I have a demanding game that I still want running so I can tab back in but not have it hogging resources in the meantime.

EX: Playing a game and waiting (Queue time in Warzone, idle time in game for machines in Satisfactory, etc...) My GPU isn't working hard with the fan spun up while I am just browsing the web or whatever while I wait. Warzone is probably the worst offender for this "I'm going to keep your gpu running fast even while minimized" behaviour

Pathduck

@AFilthyLeaf said in YT Frame Drops if you have Background Application Max Frame Rate enabled in NVIDIA:

EX: Playing a game and waiting (Queue time in Warzone, idle time in game for machines in Satisfactory, etc...) My GPU isn't working hard with the fan spun up while I am just browsing the web or whatever while I wait. Warzone is probably the worst offender for this "I'm going to keep your gpu running fast even while minimized" behaviour

OK fair enough, I guess some games behave badly. Ideally they should go idle when in the background.

So, as an experiment I renamed Vivaldi as chrome.exe running "Costa Rica 4k 60fps":

So yeah, it sucks that things are like this, and small browsers pay for the ignorance and stupidity of GPU vendors.

Note that while this might "work" renaming the program executable is not supported and you will most likely get all kinds of follow-on issues if you think doing that is a permanent fix...

So my recommendation still stands - either turn off that setting globally or create a profile for Vivaldi with the setting off.

Feel free to create a proper bug report following the outlined steps.
I know they did some change lately in 6.1 snapshots that might have fixed some of this, but not when I've tested.

Pathduck

OK so maybe my testing is not that good or my old profile is irrevocably broken, because it looks like it might be fixed in the 6.1 Snapshots after all.

Download the latest Snapshot:
https://vivaldi.com/blog/desktop/that-friday-feeling-vivaldi-browser-snapshot-3009-3/
Install that as a Standalone profile anywhere and launch it, then test again with the NV setting to enabled.

They had a fix in the previous snapshot that apparently was a (partial?) fix for this:
[Performance] Increase speed by hiding process identity (VB-96068)
https://vivaldi.com/blog/desktop/catch-up-vivaldi-browser-snapshot-3001-3/

Pathduck

An update on this, since I got digging deep into the rabbit hole.

Apparently, since I was running 32-bits Vivaldi (don't ask...) I never saw the performance fix in 6.1 - because the fix never made it into the 32-bit builds

So after some struggles updating to a 64-bit I can now confirm that yes, 6.1 fixes this issue even with the NVidia background apps setting to 30fps.

Vivaldi also consistently outperforms Chrome/Edge/Opera on the "standard" performance metric of the WebGL aquarium.
https://webglsamples.org/aquarium/aquarium.html

And this is pretty funny, Edge with the "Added Security" setting and 30k fish:

Hadden89

@Pathduck That's a lot of potassium