Hacker News Reader

Comment by deathanatos | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. I discovered just the other night that merely minimizing Discord nets me about a 20 FPS improvement in Factorio. (Even if Discord is otherwise off-screen, which it normally is, as Factorio is fullscreen, and there's no second monitor for me.)

View on HN

I'd assume it's their State of the Art™ React® frontend that's hammering your L3 cache with constant updates.

I'd like to assume that too, frankly. But I actually think it's slightly more complex. I've got CPU time to spare, as it is, and Factorio gets a solid 60 UPS. (I.e., the game simulation proceeds without lag¹.) It's the FPS that isn't there, and I think it's mostly constrained on GPU time…? But I'm really not entirely sure where the bottleneck is. (I also don't think the NVIDIA reports Discord as being on the GPU, too, so … IDK. 20 FPS is a stark, hard to miss difference.)

¹(usually…)

There is probably some context switching overhead between Discord and whatever game at the GPU driver level.

It's a lot more likely to be the overlay imho.

Oh, huh, yeah. That sounds plausible.

Same on my ArchLinux setup with RTX 2080 SUPER and nvidia drivers, Factorio at some point starts limiting to 30 fps (from 60), alt tab doesn't help, minimize/maximize too, but the moment I kill discord from the tray everything gets back to normal, the same in some other games I can't recall now

I suspect all the GIFs and animated profile pictures etc.

Unlike Slack, discord actually pauses them when the window is not focused.

So you were at 0 FPS and now at 20 FPS? Using FPS for performance without giving the before/after numbers is useless...

Not really. It just has to draw what's on the screen, which for an average base is estimable. Whether that's 40 to 60 or 140 to 160 fps doesn't really matter: it's a significant difference and I think probably absolute if you know how many flops or whatever you need per frame at a certain graphics settings level.

Not that I'd argue for making one Factorio frame a unit of measurement, to be fair; I just don't think the remark was useless.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com