EDIT: Thanks for the replies. The solution was to turn off Lenovo Vantage Server Boost.
So I have a fairly specific problem that has been surprisingly hard to troubleshoot for some reason.
Very specifically, when I am streaming on discord, while any game software is running, (we’ve tried it with a few different ones, online/offline, steam/non-steam, 2D graphics vs 3D graphics. Same issue although maybe with varying amounts of time before the problem starts, but hard to be sure.) and when at least one other person starts watching the stream, my discord connection gets unstable. Voice and video start cutting in and out and the connection icon starts turning red. This doesn’t just affect the person watching the stream, others have trouble hearing me as well. No stream? No problem. Stream but no game? No problem. Stream and game but no viewer? No problem. Just when all of these are together. Also this doesn’t seem to impact my other processes or connections. The game keeps running like normal and for the online ones they don’t lose connection. I can still go access sites on my browser, etc.
I got a new PC recently, I haven’t had this issue before that. It didn’t happen right away though, things worked fine at first. It happened for the first time a few weeks ago and after running through the basic troubleshooting steps, the thing that seemed to fix the issue was updating my nvidia graphics drivers, but it’s hard to say for sure. The problem popped up again tonight. For reference the last time I streamed to someone was on Thursday, so it was working very recently.
I checked and there was a graphics driver update, so I went to install that, thinking that would fix it again. It did not. There also seemed to be some problems around the graphics driver installer. Both times this happened the download initially stalled at some % and I had to restart to get it to work again. Plus this time I went to try to reinstall the graphics driver to see if maybe the first time it didn’t do it right and I briefly had bigger problems with the PC. During the install, the screen just went dark and didn’t come back. The rest of the computer was running, I could still chat on discord, but I had to kill it and restart to get the screen back. That restart took a while longer than normal and when I got back the start menu wasn’t working. That got fixed on another restart though.
Anyway, that’s concerning and maybe relevant, but back to the discord issue: Other troubleshooting steps that didn’t work:
- Turning hardware acceleration off/on.
- Telling windows to use my graphics card on high performance for discord and the games I was testing with. (It already seemed to be doing that on it’s own anyway, but I made sure.)
- Lowering stream quality and FPS.
- Making sure discord was added to my firewall allowed software.
- Cleared discord’s cache.
- uninstalled and reinstalled discord.
- Checked for windows or other driver updates and didn’t find any.
- Tried switching routers and did some speed tests that turned out fine.
- Checked resource usage and nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
I’m kind of at a loss here. The most I can turn up on google is all the generic troubleshooting advice you get for every problem and none of it has worked so far.
System Info:
- Windows 11
- It’s a Lenovo prebuilt desktop PC and it comes with their driver/system management software.
- Processor Intel® Core™ i7-14700F, 2100 Mhz, 20 Core(s), 28 Logical Processor(s)
- BIOS Version/Date LENOVO O5TKT3BA, 12/17/2024
- Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 32.0 GB
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER
- Headphones/mic: Razor Blackshark V2 Pro
Any ideas?
Sounds like a QoS thing, unless your connection is really bad. Assuming your network has the available capacity to game and chat, there’s probably something fucky going on with packet ordering.
There are tons of different Gamer ™ software packages that could be the culprit, but anything preinstalled by Lenovo would be my first suspect. Also check for anything labeled “Killer” in Device Manager under network or Bluetooth. Killer WiFi (and I think they have an ethernet thing as well?) is sold as a feature on some gaming devices but in my experience its name only rings true in that it’ll kill your gameplay experience.
Routers can also do QoS fuckery. If you’re on a connection with low upload (DSL, cable) check if your router does network prioritisation/Quality of Service/QoS things. If you have more than enough upload capacity, you could still check and disable the setting to see if that’s the cause.
Note that while Discord uses barely any network traffic to do voice, it’s very sensitive to latency issues. If you’re capping out the connection to your router (quite easy to do over WiFi or in P2P video calls) you could be transmitting at dozens of megabits a second with more to spare, but your VoIP connection could suck terribly because of latency and jitter.
Also worth trying: rebooting, if you haven’t already. Clicking “shut down” and then turning your PC on does not reboot it in Windows! It’s stupid but manually clicking reboot in the start menu twice sometimes fixes weird issues like these.
Lastly, as Discord is peer to peer as far as I know, your bandwidth with some other locations may just not be very good. A gigabit of upload to speedtest.net doesn’t mean you can exchange traffic with your friends directly that fast. You can try to use one of those piracy VPNs to avoid your ISPs network edge and see if that improves things.
Thanks for the detailed answer! It did turn out to be Lenovo’s software. Also I haven’t checked for killer Wi-Fi on this, but the gaming laptop I had 2 PCs ago did have that and we ended up having tons of Wi-Fi problems we were never able to fix. I guess that might be why.
I didn’t know windows doesn’t actually fully shut down. That’s confusing.
It may not be this but try checking Lenovo’s Vantage software, if you even have it installed, and look for “Network Boost” or something similar sounding. It might be enabled by default and disabling it might help you.
I helped a friend diagnose a similar issue. It was a Lenovo laptop that of course came with Vantage preinstalled. And the issue was similar in the way that he would be on a Discord call with me and everything was fine with the audio quality and ping until he would start streaming an online game, then his audio and stream would stutter heavily and he would see high ping on Discord. I don’t quite remember all the details to be sure it was the same as your case. At least for his case, disabling the Network Boost option solved the issue.
I believe that the idea of that Network Boost is that you can give higher network priority to game data packets and everything else comes later, when most default network protocols give audio and video higher priority usually. So at least in my friend’s case the game would see an unperceptively small ping boost while Discord would just struggle to work.
Thanks. I just tested this myself with another device and it seems to be working. I guess we’ll see if it’s fine with others later, but looks promising.
Two more generic things you could try:
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Lower the Discord voice codec quality, just to see if it changes anything.
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Uninstall your GPU Drivers with DDU and reinstall them.
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Honestly, why not ask Discord support? It’s literally their problem they’d want to fix most likely :D
Discord hasn’t had a support team for a while now. That team has been wholly outsourced to a bot auto-denies any requests and directs you to the help page that sent you to the bot in the first place.
