In short: If you often leave Discord open on your desktop and have recently noticed a decrease in game performance on your Nvidia GPU, Discord failure may be the culprit. Nvidia will release a fix soon, but will also offer manual troubleshooting instructions.
Nvidia admitted this week that a recent Discord update has caused memory overload on Nvidia GPUs. This failure may affect the performance of the game, as it does not allow the video memory to reach full clock speed when running games.
The GPU manufacturer plans to fix the problem in a future update, but has also provided a workaround for those who can’t wait. The manual fix involves using the GeForce 3D Profile Manager to edit the SLI profile— a rather complicated operation.
Users who don’t have 3D Profile Manager can download it from Nvidia’s website. After installing and opening the program, select “Export SLI Profiles”. When the Explorer window appears, select a place to export and save the Nvidia profile file, which should be text.
Then open the file in Notepad and find “Discord”. A section should appear starting with “Discord Profile” and ending with “EndProfile”. At the bottom, right above “endprofile” and below “Setting ID_0x809d5f60 = 0x10000000”, enter “Setting ID_0x50166c5e = 0x00000000”. After that, the section should look like in the screenshot above.
After that, save the profile as a file .txt, go back to the 3D Profile Manager and select “Import SLI Profiles”. When the Explorer window appears, select the file you just saved, click Open, and then close the 3D Profile Manager.
Nvidia did not specify which update could have caused the problem. Perhaps it was a recent Discord patch that added the ability for streamers with RTX 40 series GPUs to encode using the AV1 codec.
The new codec has demonstrated a significant increase in efficiency compared to H.264, allowing streamers and content creators to encode clearer video with less bandwidth consumption. In addition, AV1 does not require royalties, unlike H.265.
However, H.265 hardware encoding requires the latest graphics cards, such as the RTX 40 series, AMD RDNA3 and Intel Arc Alchemist. Future Intel Meteor Lake processors will also include AV1 hardware encoding.
Discord now uses this feature to allow Nitro subscribers to encode at 8 Mbps in [email protected] It is unclear when Discord may extend AV1 encoding to subscribers with RDNA3 or Arc Alchemist GPUs.
