Description of the issue:
When playing videos on YouTube and other sites there is noticeable frame drops compared to other browsers.
How can this issue be reproduced?
Go to a Youtube video
Open “stats for the nerds”
Compare number of dropped frames with other browsers
Expected result:
Ideally there should be 0 frames dropped but even a few are not an issue as long as it is comparable with other browsers, but it is a lot. Brave Version( check About Brave):
v1.64.109 Additional Information:
The frame drop increases when I go full screen mode.
My laptop has AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS (Radeon 780m iGPU) and NVidia RTX 4070 (dGPU)
I tested using both the iGPU and dGPU (started brave in performance mode from windows graphics settings to force using nvidia)
My screen refresh rate is 240hz and freesync and anti-lag are enabled in AMD adrenalin software.
I have tested the same videos on brave for android and there was no problem so I am sure it is a desktop issue or something specifically with my hardware.
@farahats9 a lot of it is probably going to be combing through settings within the control panels for each of the graphics cards. There’s been a lot of things that have made differences for people over the years that it gets tough to ever say any one specific thing.
I know for AMD, one of the primary impacts from people was renaming Brave to chrome.exe and suddenly AMD gave it better performance. But they also had to disable various functions of which I can’t remember the terms. But might be worth testing with freesync off and all just as a starting point. Also make sure to look through programs as, at least in the past, it showed Brave as a game rather than seeing it like a browser. The settings were a bit mixed up and needed manual adjustments to get the best performance.
In terms of NVIDIA, people have shared that issues like setting Max Frame Rate had been the cause of similar problems. It’s been a while and I might be wrong, but thinking MFAA and/or Triple Buffering causes problems.
One of the things I’d ask, what happens if you test with graphics acceleration disabled in Brave?
And I just finished testing random videos and quality tiers, but didn’t have a big issue on my Windows 11 Pro with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080. Example of one is below.
Actually kept that video running in the background as writing this and when I switched back, I did see that it had some dropped frames. I’ve tested a few times and it does seem to be a key thing for me. If I stay on the window, nothing dropped. If I go to multitask, I’ll get like 1-3 dropped frames. A few minutes ago it was at 9, then I wrote this paragraph, and now…
So seems switching tabs is causing about 2 dropped frames each time, which is weird.
I tried another video and left it on full screen. It ended up with dropped frames as well, so might be what you’re speaking of. But what numbers are you getting in comparison?
I have tried changing various settings in AMD Adrenalin software like disabling freesync and anti-lag etc… but no luck.
Regarding testing with NVidia I didn’t change any settings for Brave, when I check the program settings from NVidia control panel all are set to default, max frame rate is off and so is MFAA and Triple buffering.
I also tested with graphics acceleration disabled and still got frame drops.
I noticed that mouse actions and movement also increase the frame drops not just tab switching. All my tests are with the video in foreground. I am getting 10-17 frames dropped in under 1 minute video.
I am also getting some frame drops in Edge but much less. And by far Firefox is rarely dropping frames for me.
I did some more tests. When disabling one of the 2 cards completely the problem disappears. i.e. if I completely disable the nvidia card (eco mode) or completely disable the AMD (ultimate mode but requires restarting pc) it works fine, the problem is this is not a solution as I am multi-tasking most of the time.
I also noticed the amount of dropped frames increases when I use the nvidia card in a game then close the game and use Brave, its like the nvidia GPU didn’t fully switch off after the game as I see “explorer.exe” process still running on nvidia when I check nvidia-smi
So something is wrong with the way it handles “Optimus” feature that switches the graphics. Any help from someone who had this problem before is appreciated.
These are working for me now, note that without setting Media Foundation for Clear Rendering Strategy there will be a moment of blackout at the start of any video and also videos on Reddit become black when you hover over the seeking UI. these problems do not exist if you select ANGLE graphics backend to D3D11on12 but I found that this gives stutters on non-video content like regular browsing and scrolling and CSS animations.
With these settings everything looks good so far and no frame drops (except if I switch to another tab) I hope this helps anyone having the same problems, I can now use Brave again.
