I am writing to provide feedback regarding a persistent issue I have encountered with hardware acceleration enabled in the Brave Browser.
Issue Description:
The problem manifests when enabling hardware acceleration in the browser settings. Specifically, when two videos (such as two YouTube videos or one YouTube video and one Twitch stream) are played concurrently, both videos start to buffer and stutter immediately.
System Specifications:
CPU: Intel i9 13900K
GPU: Nvidia 4090
RAM: 32GB DDR5 7200
Windows 11 Pro - 23H2 - 22631.2792
Observations:
Interestingly, upon disabling hardware acceleration, the issue disappears entirely. I can effortlessly watch 10 or more videos simultaneously without encountering any buffering or stuttering problems. This leads me to believe that the issue is closely tied to the hardware acceleration feature in the Brave Browser.
Comparison with Other Browsers:
It is worth noting that I do not encounter this issue when using the latest version of Google Chrome with hardware acceleration enabled. The problem seems to be specific to the Brave Browser, as other browsers do not exhibit the same behavior on my system.
Software Environment:
I ensure that all my drivers are up to date.
That means it’s not an issue with Brave but is an issue with your graphics card or graphics settings. I want you to search this site using the search terms @saoiray nvidia and you’ll see a lot of topics where people have complained about issues. You’ll likely want to sort it by Latest Post.
You’ll also see links shared and suggestions. Most importantly, you’ll see how people had their issues resolved based on doing things like resetting their graphics card, updating graphics, or changing settings like MFAA or background frame rate.
How come I don’t have the issue when using Chrome as mentioned in my post?
There must be a difference in how Brave and Chrome handle hardware acceleration.
I just tested it with Firefox, just for fun, no issues either, so how can it be an issue with my GPU, setting, or driver if only Brave has the issue?
I want to use Brave, that’s why I am here, trying to make it better and have issues fixed.
It just makes no sense that the issue is not with Brave.
EDIT: I did search before I posted, I used “hardware acceleration” as a search term, but didn’t find issues that are the same as mine, most had general issues, even with a single video, so I made a new post. But good job making new users feel comfortable.
I mean, you have to look at things from my side. For me to give you the big answer, I actually have to do the same search I’m telling you to do. Then I have to scroll to answers and copy/paste over here. It’s time consuming and at times annoying to repeat the process. So I just was really trying to help teach you how to search and reference you on the best ways to look. Then you’d see the same thing.
But since you want to use sarcasm to make it sound like I’m not helping and perhaps you just don’t want to do it, I’ll take the time once again.
List kind of keeps going. But yeah…(Also a reminder, I’m just another user. I don’t get paid for this. I’m a volunteer who is taking time to reply and help people)
Both Chrome and Brave as well as FF use global settings in the control panel, no specific chances for any browser, just double-checked. I will have a look at the links.
But simply saying everything is dandy with Brave is not great.
I understand that Brave is not Chrome, but both are based on Chromium, and Firefox is different entirely.
To throw another browser in the game, Edge, also Chromium-based, tested just now while typing this, and had no issues either, I made sure it had hardware acceleration enabled, and the control panel is set to global settings just like the other browser.
Now, 3 browsers can do it properly with hardware acceleration, only Brave has an issue, and everything else on the system is in the same conditions as I tested everything today, with no reboots or any updates in between, a proper apples-to-apples comparison.
I will look at the search, and perhaps try a few things, but I think it is more than fair to say that Brave could improve this. A general Google search, just for browser hardware acceleration issues when playing video, most results are for Brave specifically.
Thanks, I will have a look, and no I don’t try to make you do all the work, don’t need hand-holding. I did a quick search, didn’t find matching issues and with other browsers not showing the same problem, the issue is rather clear cut in my book.
Thanks for the copy-pasta, appreciate it, I will certainly have a look.
I’d say it’s a very small portion of people actually having issues. Plus when you combine it to posts like I mentioned, it’s generally found to be due to graphics settings. That’s the big headache of all.
There have been some small numbers I’ve seen where adjusting things in brave://flags might resolve. Such as I went to turn on Vulkan the other day and it messed up my graphics something fierce. I had to disable it again. For others, they have to modify settings in Choose ANGLE graphics backend.
Then of course there’s also people who have posted where we found out their issue was extensions. Definitely are a lot of variables in play.
Sorry if you felt I was being all negative. Just really try to nudge people in different ways to research and test. Then hope they can speak more of what they tried and what didn’t work. Then it’s able to narrow down a bit more.
And it is weird that it’s primarily NVIDIA, especially their newer chips, that’s been having issues with Brave. I have a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 and pretty much have no issues. There was a small period of time I was getting checkerboard like designs, but after resetting graphics and updating, it all went away.
So I read through most of what you linked, the issues are not the exact same, but I checked how they resolved it and what was suggested.
Now I have not re-installed my GPU driver, but I do a DDU clean install via safe mode about every 3 to 6 months, but right now, the driver has been updated a few times.
MFAA is off
Background FPS limit is off.
What I do use though is G-Sync and a Max FPS limit to keep FPS in the G-Sync window.
I just started testing, only changing one thing at a time, and the first thing I turned off was Max FPS, just for Brave, program-specific profile, this appears to solve the issue for me.
Now, this might be solved for me, but, I think this is still an issue with Brave, for some reason Bave doesn’t like a max FPS limit, yet the other browsers have no problem with it.
I would hope the Brave Developer will have a closer look at why the FPS limit could be an issue in combination with hardware acceleration.
That means it’s not an issue with Brave but is an issue with your graphics card or graphics settings.
If a browser only works without hardware acceleration then it becomes useless for anything more complex that simple text + images, so this is a non solution. I keep checking Brave every few months and keep going away because of performance issues I have with no other browser (Edge, Chrome, Firefox).
And while one of my quoted workarounds involved disabling background frame-rate limiting for Brave via Nvidia driver, this was only to solve this specific issues. Not only is this not necessary with other browsers, but Brave keeps suffering from performance issues independent of this singular setting.
Indeed. Good thing nobody is saying to leave it off. It just gets recommended as a troubleshooting step in order to identify an issue.
According to your last post that I had seen, which was linked here, your issues were resolved. But looking now, I see you had one at Youtube playback tearing up when dGPU outputs over iGPU where Jarc did a poor job of helping you. If you’re still having issues, can also talk and look into things.
It’s actually been resolving issues for others, such as OP here.
Well, interesting part is that even occasionally doing things like renaming Brave executable to chrome.exe instead actually resolves some of these issues. I think this is because NVIDIA and others actually optimize for Chrome, Edge, and Firefox which is why those other browsers do well. And yeah, this is something that we should all be contacting NVIDIA about and trying to get them to optimize. Then perhaps also get Brave to look deeper and reach out to NVIDIA as well.
Just wanted to say thanks for this thread and all of the information provided that resulted in resolution. I’ve been suffering with this issue for awhile now and tried many things to no avail. I too use G-Sync with a Max FPS cap to ensure I’m always within the G-Sync active window, and by disabling the FPS limit for Brave only via NVCP, I can now use my preferred browser with HW on. Here’s to hoping some progress can be made in resolving this on a larger scale for those not privy to tinkering.
sigh While playing multiple videos in windowed everything is now fine with HW Accel on. However, once in fullscreen on YT if you let the video play for a bit, this harsh stutter will come about and persist for the entire time you watch the video while in fullscreen. OP, do you have this issue as well?
