Discord may be limiting your Nvidia GPU’s memory, but here’s how you can fix it

In short: If you often leave Discord open on your desktop and have recently noticed a drop in game performance on your Nvidia GPU, Discord crashing might be the culprit. Nvidia will release a fix soon, but will also offer instructions on how to fix the problem manually.

Nvidia admitted this week that a recent Discord update caused this is for memory throttling on Nvidia GPUs. This glitch can affect game performance as it prevents the VRAM from reaching full clock speed when running games.

The GPU manufacturer plans to fix the issue in a future update, but has also provided a workaround for those who can’t wait. The manual fix involves using the GeForce 3D Profile Manager to edit the SLI profile – a fairly complex operation.

Users who do not have 3D Profile Manager can download it from the Nvidia website. After installing and opening the program, select “Export SLI Profiles”. When the explorer window appears, select the export location and save the Nvidia profiles file, which should be a text file.

Then open the file in Notepad and search for “Discord”. You should see a section starting with “Discord Profile” and ending with “EndProfile”. At the bottom, right above “EndProfile” and below “Setting ID_0x809d5f60 = 0x10000000”, enter “Setting ID_0x50166c5e = 0x00000000”. After that, the section should look like the screenshot above.

After that, save the profile as a .txt file, go back to the 3D Profile Manager and select “Import SLI Profiles”. When the Explorer window appears, select the file you just saved, click Open, and then close the 3D Profile Manager.

Nvidia did not specify which update may have caused the problem. It may have been a recent Discord patch that added the ability for streamers with RTX 40 series GPUs to encode using the AV1 codec.

The new codec has shown significant performance gains over H.264, allowing streamers and content creators to encode sharper video while consuming less bandwidth. In addition, AV1 is royalty-free, unlike H.265.

However, H.265 hardware encoding requires the latest graphics cards such as the RTX 40 series, AMD RDNA3, and Intel Arc Alchemist. Future Intel Meteor Lake processors will also include AV1 hardware encoding.

Discord is now using this feature to allow Nitro subscribers to encode at 8Mbps in [email protected] It’s not yet clear when Discord will be able to expand AV1 encoding for subscribers with RDNA3 or Arc Alchemist GPUs.