Playing higher resolution streams on Kick.com in full screen runs very poorly. Slow framerate, pausing, audio/video desync.
I CAN fix this by changing the flag “Choose ANGLE graphics backend” to something like OpenGL, but this breaks support for RTX video enhancement, which requires DX11 to work.
Not having this issue on Youtube or Twitch. And playing a kick.com stream in this way on the Microsoft Edge browser does not have this issue.
I don’t know exactly when this started, but it was months ago. It used to be fine.
System specs: Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB Ram, RTX 3080, Windows 11, Any version of Brave in the last few months.
@evildoer,
Do you by chance have Graphics Acceleration enabled? If so, can you please try togging it off and see if this makes any difference? On my end I’m not seeing this issue, but I’m also using an integrated graphics card on this particular laptop (note that I cannot reproduce this on macOS either).
Its smooth as butter with graphics acceleration turned off, BUT, the RTX super resolution and HDR features will not work with it turned off.
And BTW, its not every stream/game. The complexity or bitrate seems to matter somehow. Some streams seem to run fine, and others horribly. And this is with the RTX features turned off too, BTW, but that does make it even slower with them on.
Something else I forgot to mention is that this is when running 1080p streams at 4k.
1 Like
At least that gives us some additional information. Let me reach out to a couple of our devs to see if they can shed some light on this. Appreciate your patience.
Anything?
By the way, I also see this on some Rumble streams. Runs fine in Edge browser, slow/choppy in Brave, when full screen.
Ok, I have found the major problem. Its when you run Brave in 2 windows, and have video playing in more than one window. THAT is where it gets really bad. I am dropping approximately 50% of frames, even on Youtube. If you wonder why I am doing this, its because I have a security camera running in one window, and the main content I am watching in the other. But it happens with any type of video in two windows.
Ive also found a secondary issue. Single window, only one video playing. 0 extensions loaded. I am dropping 2-3 frames per second, but only in windowed mode. Same stream in Edge, 0 dropped frames. This obviously isnt as big of an issue, but I have a good system, and this shouldnt be happening.
@evildoer,
I’m still unable to reproduce this issue, even when following the steps in your last reply. If I could have you run one more quick test and create a new temp. profile (Menu --> More tools --> Add profile), close your original profile window, then try reproduce the issue in the new profile.
The problem is, its not every stream. I have no idea what makes some different than others. And I cant do any comparisons right now because I cant find a stream its happening on at the moment. But when they do pop up, its consistent. No matter how many times I restart the browser, turn extensions on or off, etc.
One thing I forgot to mention, is that in Youtube, when you turn on stats for nerds, the Live Latency which is normally around 20s, goes down to 0.00s with this issue.
That is also where I was watching the dropped frames from. Was having neither issue on Edge with the same stream.
I found something very interesting. I dont think this is a video specific problem. Its something to do with running multiple windows of Brave, period.
I had a separate window instance with a tab set to auto refresh, and every time the tab reloaded, the Youtube video stream in the other window would freeze, and buffer. When that tab was reattached to the main window, the video would run fine on each refresh!
Its some sort of issue where it hogs the priority, or something when a new window is created. Leaving the main window as a low priority. It just doesnt share the resources. Even though my computer is a beast. (32 threads and plenty of ram)
And no, it has nothing to do with the auto refresh extension. If I manually refresh a tab in the second window, the video freezes as well.
And I just found one more condition. The video stream needs to be on the active tab. If its playing in a background tab it does not freeze and buffer.
edit: Frustratingly, this isnt every stream it does this with, and possibly not every web page reloading in the other either. Hard to reproduce. When I discovered this I was reloading the Amazon tracking page. I wish I had done more testing with the stream it was happening on.
edit: OK if you are using Youtube and turn on stats for nerds, you can see it happening on every stream to a degree. Even if it doesnt fully pause and rebuffer, you still see the dropped frames increase a lot every time you reload from the other window.
It seems to be worse when you are watching a stream at, say 1.5x speed.
To let you know how crazy this is… you know how you can install “apps” like for google chat? And its just an instance of Brave… Anyways, I am listening to a stream at 1.5x, and open google chat, and the stream pauses and rebuffers as it loaded up, but whats crazy is I had to look back in history, as in just scroll upwards. And each time a new set of a few lines of TEXT loaded, the video stream in the other window would pause and rebuffer. This must be a TINY amount of data, yet it still causes these freezes??
And no, I do not have shitty internet. Its 1gbps and do not get hiccups or anything.
edit: It gets worse. I wanted to test if it was a network issue or not, so I opened an empty local .txt file in the other Brave window, and just hitting reload on an empty text file is making the videos steam in the other window lose frames and freeze up!!!
This doesnt just happen on live streams. Fully uploaded videos, if I reload a text file in a separate Brave window makes the video in the other window drop frames, and if I am running it at 1.5x or something, it actually pauses and re buffers.
Doing exactly the same thing, detaching a tab and repeatedly reloading a text file in Edge browser while playing a video drops ZERO frames
It playsback fine here in fullscreen. I’m just using the default HW acceleration settings enabled.
Adding this into brave://adblock
kick.com##+js(trusted-set-cookie, stream_quality_cookie, 1080)
Will force 1080p on load. Nothing choppy or anything. Checked various streams also, and using Ethernet to the router (not Wifi)
A test, a little compression due to OBS, but seems good.
While I appreciate you popping in, and I do apologize that is there is a lot to read, it really seems like you didnt read that much. This has moved on from Kick and Ive been talking about Youtube for quite a while now, and the problem is with very specific conditions.
And speaking of conditions, Ive found something else that I failed to mention…
My display runs at 120hz. When I move it down to 60hz, I am not seeing the huge drops or freezes and re buffering that I do when its at 120hz. But I do see a couple of dropped frames, like maybe 2 per second when I do all of the other things I mentioned with a second window. Its also in HDR, but that doesnt seem to affect it.
To summarize. If you want to test this, you need a 120hz display, run Brave, run a video (youtube is easier to watch dropped frames with the stats for nerds), also run it faster than 1x if you want to see the effect amplified. Tear a tab off the main window into its own window. Load some kind of content in this new window. Another video, or any kind of content really. Reload it a few times. As Ive said, even a local text file and spam the reload button achieves this as well. Look at the stats for nerds in the youtube window as you do this, and youll see the dropped frames add up, and/or the video will periodically freeze up, and buffer.
Regarding refresh rate, Kick, Twitch are mostly 60hz/60fps. To be honest I’ve yet to see any streamer to use 120fps video (or anything above 60fps). Youtube is probably the same also. High framerate good for testing on the UFO test and gaming.
I have a 144hz screen, no issues with screen tearing with HW acceleration enabled.
I know the videos are not playing at 120 fps.
I am simply telling you this is a factor in the issue I am seeing. It could be a timing issue, or something when rendering a 60 or 30 fps video at 120hz.
I dont know, but thats whats happening.
I have not mentioned tearing once. That is not a problem I am having. Its dropped frames, and also the video freezing, then re buffering.
This problem does not even need another window. I noticed that holding my mouse pointer over a tab till it shows the summary caused dropped frames, so I moved my mouse left and right over the tabs so its dropping down the summaries of all the tabs one after another, and THAT causes a video, a regular uploaded video, running at normal 1x speed, TO FREEZE UP. And will stay frozen as long as I am continuing to move the mouse left and right, and will only buffer and resume after I stop moving the mouse. It happens at 60hz, but not to the same degree as 120hz.
So its like any interaction with the browser, any elements drawing/redrawing, saps the ability to draw video frames.
Changing the ANGLE backend to opengl or dx9 reduces the amount of frames dropped, but this is not an option because I wish to use the RTX super resolution feature (which I have disabled for this testing)
Turning off hardware acceleration does the same thing, helps it a lot, but disables my ability to use the RTX feature.
I noticed today on IMDB.com when just viewing the page, when I was at the top of the page with the preview video playing, the scrolling in the browser was really low fps, but when i scrolled down below the video it was nice and smooth. So I went out to look for a way to display the FPS of the browser, and while it isnt what i was looking for, I found https://www.vsynctester.com/ … and the differing results of Edge vs Brave are quite interesting. Not only is Edge (on the left) a much more stable framerate, but theres also a flashing VSYNC indicator, that cycles between two colors, and if its properly rendering both colors one after another, it appears gray as the two colors are mixing. On Edge this IS grey, its working fine, but on Brave you see flashes of the individual colors of red and blue.
Both browers are forced to using DX11 ANGLE backend
OK, thats handy, I didnt know Chromium browsers had a built in FPS feature. So as I was saying in the previous message. IMDB was slow at the top of the page where a video is playing in Brave. Heres the details…
Edge:
Brave:
Whats going on here?
edit: Oh my… I just noticed the Brave screenshot said GPU raster off. I looked into that and it was “default” in both browsers, and when I forced Brave to use GPU raster ENABLE the FPS was way up similar to Edge!!! Is this the root of all of my problems? Let me go testing to find out.
edit: No… this does NOT fix my original problem. But it does fix some of the issues I was having. Like that vsync page is working properly now as well.
So… Brave is much smoother in some ways now that I force that option on. But the question is, why was it not on when set to default? Why was it in Edge? Is it possible the issues I am seeing are other defaults not working properly?
