Poor video performance on Twitch.tv.

ronyxs

Hello,

I just wanted to drop a little feedback from my own experience with this browser. It has many interesting features, but it performs very poorly playing high-res Twitch streams, which is a sticking point for me.

I have Twitch playing in the background pretty much at all times. Often that means having multiple streams open at the same time, in separate windows. Vivaldi really struggles with that. Even with just 3 or 4 streams, most of them start to stutter after a short while, and only the active one performs well. It seems as though the browser gives high priority to the active 'foreground' window, but very low priority to the rest of them.

I did a test where I opened 10 streams filling up the screen area. After a while some of the background streams completely froze. My GPU was averaging about 60% most of the time.
When I did the same with Firefox, all streams were playing extremely smoothly, and the GPU was at about 40% most of the time.

i7-9700K, RTX 2080

I think Vivaldi has some catching up to do.
If there are any settings that may improve video decoding, please advise. Thanks.

luetage

@ronyxs You should compare Vivaldi with Chrome, Opera, Brave, or Chromium, not Firefox.

ronyxs

@Gwen-Dragon I don't have an Intel GPU. I have RTX 2080 with latest drivers. Here is the vivaldi://gpu info https://pastebin.com/9jitzRjs

I've noticed these video playback issues on multiple computers where I've tried Vivaldi, for some time now. My last computer had a GTX 980 - same thing. It's not an issue with my hardware.

@luetage
Naturally I compare Vivaldi to the main browser I use which is Firefox, which performs better. It's not useful to me to compare it to other browsers that I don't use.
But out of curiosity I also tried Chrome with multiple simultaneous streams and it had the same issues as Vivaldi. The stuttering started as soon as I opened a few streaming windows, same as Vivaldi. That doesn't really help me though, and I don't care about Chrome.

Just to be clear - I'm not talking about having multiple open tabs in the same window, and only watching one of them. I'm talking about dragging the tabs out to their own separate windows and watching them at the same time in a tile arrangement.
Has any of you tried what I described above, and had no issues?

luetage

@ronyxs The reason I told you to test this with an additional chromium browser was to find out if Vivaldi code is to blame, or chromium code. Since chromium seems to be responsible in your current setup, you should report this to chromium directly, or try to find information there.

ronyxs

@luetage So have you tried what I described, and do you experience any skipping or stuttering when viewing multiple Twitch streams? If others are having the same issue, then at least I would know it's not something on my end.

I don't know what is chromium (I'm guessing that's related to Chrome?), or the relationship between Vivaldi and other browsers. Honestly I'm not interested in any of that, or what Vivaldi is built upon. I'm just a simple user who's having issues with Vivaldi. If this is not something that the Vivaldi team can address, that's unfortunate.

luetage

@ronyxs I don't think that's something I can easily test, because my internet connection speed wouldn't allow for concurrent streams anyway. You're also not addressing the Vivaldi team here, but users like yourself. All the browsers named here use the Blink rendering engine, developed by Google. In contrast Firefox uses Quantum. You might not care about it, but it's still important since your issue might be with Blink and not code written by Vivaldi developers.

ronyxs

@luetage I submitted a bug report.

Pathduck

Out of pure curiosity, I did a quick test with 6 simultaneous twitch videos playing:
https://youtu.be/PkOQjJAdQUE

No big CPU/GPU issues here, and this is on a 5 year old system:
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4790K CPU @ 4.00GHz, 4001 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970

Most of the load seems to be on the GPU process and from the ffmpeg.exe used to record the screen...

Also, the horror (oh the horror!) of having to listen to multiple nasally-voiced yobs trying to outdo one another in whooping, screaming and obscenities should earn me a medal

Komposten

I tested running 5 streams at 1080p60 and 1 at 960p30 in tiled tabs (all visible at the same time) for a few minutes. All ran just fine with high quality and no stuttering/freezing, while I also had Overwatch running at ultra settings with 100-180 fps.

I'm using a Radeon 5700XT (slightly weaker than an RTX 2080) with a Ryzen 2600X. GPU usage was at 96%, but then I was also running Overwatch as mentioned above so that isn't really comparable.

ronyxs

@Pathduck @KOMPOSTEN

Thank you very much for testing. That's very strange. It's definitely not a resource issue. With 8 open streams Vivaldi is using about 20% CPU and 60% GPU. RAM is way under my limit (32 GB).

I took a clip to show what the stutter looks like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yva4SH5UuEY&feature=youtu.be

You can clearly see it, especially in the high-motion scenes like cars moving or people running - general lag and choppiness of the playback, and occasional momentary freezes. Also, if I turn on the sound, it skips from time to time.

Komposten

@ronyxs Did another test and found that it does lag for me as well, but only if I have the Twitch streams in different windows. When I put 8 windows with different streams I saw lots of lag, just like in your video. However, when I put all those streams into a single window and tiled the tabs so I could still see all 8 streams at once, the lag disappeared and all streams ran smoothly (with about the same GPU usage as when it was lagging).

ronyxs

@Komposten Thanks for checking again! So I'm not crazy then

I had no idea that I can view tiled tabs within a single window. How do you do that? I searched the settings for 'tile' and found some shortcuts for tiling the tabs: Ctrl + F6/F7/F8/F9, but nothing seems to happen when I use any of these hotkey combos.
What am I missing?

Catweazle

Also no problems with AMD Radeon 2Gb

mib2berlin

@ronyxs
Hi, open your streams in tabs, select the tabs with Shift+Click.
In the status bar near the screen shot icon is the tile icon, choose the tiling option you like.
You can create a tab stack as well and tile this to save space in the tab bar.

Cheers, mib

ronyxs

@mib2berlin Thanks, I didn't realize I had to select the tabs first.
And yes, tiled tabs in a single window performs way better than multiple windows. It seems to work well.

@Komposten Thank you!

npro

@yeppiyep You did what Komposten & mib2berlin proposed to do with the tiled tabs and you still have the problem with this method as well you mean?

ALeX27

Having the same problem even with one 1080p60 stream. Something is wrong with hardware accelerated decoding on all chromium based browsers. My graphics card is Radeon RX590.

singhudit61

This post is deleted!

simplufici

@ronyxs
Hello,

I've ran into the same poor performance on Twitch.tv - which did not happened before, possibly one of the last updates did screwed something. If I watch a stream while the chat is opened too, the stream stutters very much. Closing the chat solves the issue - but maybe I don't want to actually do that, you know? In my case disabling "hardware acceleration" solved the issue apparently. I would like to mention that this did not occurred on Chrome/Brave tho'. On these 2 I can normally watch stream with chat ON while the "hardware acceleration" is enabled.