[SOLVED] Gaming while watching Youtube performance issue

statikregimen

Happy Thanksgiving everyone (prolly wont really get another chance to say it here this year)!

When playing certain(most) games on one screen, while trying to watch Youtube on another, my overall framerate drops dramatically in both applications, often times causing them, and the WM to hang. It was never perfect in Ubuntu (or Winderps) on this machine, but acceptable/stable, so at least I know it can be done.

Changing video quality/size, game quality/resolution doesn't seem to help much.

Turning vsync on in the affected games resolves the problem, but I never had to do that in the aforementioned OSes, and would really rather not enable it in first person shooters (though it's a fine solution for many games, annoyingly).

I tried Compton as a "Hail Mary", and while it did seem to make the system more stable, it did not seem to affect performance (nor the effectiveness of enabling vsync in games). I'm still exploring configuration options, but not sure if this is a rabbit trail or not.

Hardware is more than capable: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/MSI_GT72S-G220 - using a 3440x1440 monitor on the HDMI...so not expecting mind blowing performance, but at least want to achieve the performance I've had before.

Window manager is Qtile.... don't recall having issues in Ubuntu, but could be wrong...I hope not.

Thanks in advance for any insight! Sorry if I've left anything out...

EDIT: Vimeo happens to work a lot better...so maybe a Firefox issue?

Roman_Gruber · Posted: Thu Nov 30, 2017 4:23 pm Post subject:

Does the NVIDIA GPU is passed through the crappy build in intel gpu and htan to the output devices? Marketed as Nivida optimus and such.

I have used several intel gpu based notebooks, or hybrid ones, and I see microlags, a lot of unresponsiveness, driver issues in windows 10. so in my point of view, the intel gpu is the source of those issues

I play urbanterror with 660m on the internal lvds and watch youtube on VGA with my external monitor. I use i3wm + eudev + openrc. I3wm launches separate x-servers for every virtual screen.

it could also be a setup issue, an issue with a not decent choice of your window manager.

Firefox is problematic recently, I have not watched it in details, but it seems it has issues.

When you game I recommend that you use something slim as window manager anyway, slim and simple

Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

statikregimen

Thanks for the replies!

statikregimen · Posted: Sat Dec 02, 2017 1:19 am Post subject:

Well, mpv has not alleviated the problem entirely, but it's 10x better. It's also better for my needs than VLC - no GUI makes it work really well in a tiling WM, so thank you for introducing me to it! Got it set up with youtube-dl (had to rebuild ffmpeg w/ the openssl use flag) and I'm in business. I still have to use vsync in my games, and it's inconvenient to use YT this way, so it's not a permanent solution, but will get me by nicely in the mean time

havana8 · n00b Joined: 17 Nov 2017 Posts: 16

If someone finds a way to fix it please share it! It would be helpful for sure!

statikregimen · Posted: Wed Dec 06, 2017 2:17 pm Post subject:

statikregimen · Posted: Sat Jul 14, 2018 1:05 am Post subject:

Well, it's been several months. Thought maybe it'd work itself out eventually, but so far the issue remains.

Last night, I tried a few suggestions from here - specifically 1000hz timer frequency. I also enabled CONFIG_SCHED_AUTOGROUP, because it sounded good, and was the closest I could find to that link's suggestion of enabling "Automatically use SCHED_ISO policy for X", which I suppose is probably part of the Zen kernel they recommend (or has been dropped). These options had little effect.

Today, I enabled CONFIG_SCHED_SMT, CONFIG_SCHED_MC, and CONFIG_SCHED_MC_PRIO and selected Core 2/Newer Xeon as my Processor Family in addition to the above.

The sum of these changes have made a noticeable difference, but still things slow down quite a bit as long as a video is playing, rendering the video unwatchable and the game unplayable. Mainly, what I gained was the overall framerates of both the game and browser are notably higher by at least double, and I can pause the video reliably without the whole system eventually coming to a halt.

Again: other distros and Windows have both let me watch videos smoothly while gaming, with minimal impact on game frame rates, so something is definitely off with my Gentoo

p.s. I did try rebuilding nvidia-drivers after the kernel changes, just to be sure, but no change =/

statikregimen · Posted: Sun Jul 15, 2018 7:19 pm Post subject:

I may have solved this...I will mark as such after more testing.

First, I tried switching my kernel's Preemtion Model (under Processor Type and Features) to "Voluntary Kernel Preemption (Desktop)" from Real-time (I will be using this machine for music production and recording). This didn't make much difference (thankfully so hopefully now I can switch it back).

I've noticed several times that Firefox seemed to gobble up a lot of CPU time, so after randomly googling around since I noticed, I finally found https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/04/small-tweak-makes-firefox-linux-run-much-faster

In the Firefox address bar, enter