Is your Nvidia card suddenly running slower? That could be the reason

In the last few days, Nvidia card owners have made an amazing discovery. Whenever you have the popular communication tool Discord open in the background, your graphics card suddenly runs slower. The reason for the problem was found quickly and will be fixed in an upcoming update. However, if you don’t want to wait until then, you can tackle the problem yourself.

Nvidia card clocks slower thanks to Discord

Within just a few years, the Discord communication program has established itself as the voice chat program of choice for almost all PC gamers, outperforming TeamSpeak in particular.

But some Discord users, in whose computers an Nvidia card is used, made a crazy discovery within the last few days. Once they start Discord, the graphics memory of your Nvidia card clocks down. Although the clock rate only drops by around 200 MHz, which does not have a major impact on gaming performance, this hardware behavior is still annoying and puzzling:

One of the affected users reached out to Discord himself to find out exactly what the problem is – and how to fix it. And sure enough, a Discord contributor could find a workaround that reverses the graphics memory slowdown:

• loading nvidiaprofileinspector via GitHub download and start the program.
• From there, type “discord” into the search bar to access the app’s driver settings.
• Look for the line “CUDA – Force P2 State” sets it to “Off”.
• Click “Apply changes” in the upper right corner and exit the “nvidia profile inspector”.
• Restart Discord.

Recently, AMD has been the main source of negative headlines when it comes to graphics cards:

Nvidia wants to solve Discord problem with update

The problem has not escaped Nvidia either. On the official website the error has already been recorded. A solution is to be delivered to all affected PCs in a future update. If you don’t want to wait that long, you can also follow Nvidia’s in-house guide to get rid of the problem now:

• Load that GeForce 3D Profile Manager down and then open it.
• Click on the “Export SLI Profiles” button.
• Saves the text file.
• Open the text file you just saved in Notepad.
• Search within the text file via Ctrl-F for the term “Discord”.
• Adds the line “Setting ID_0x50166c5e = 0x00000000” to the end of the relevant section.

• Save the revised text file.
• Now press the “Import SLI Profiles” button in the GeForce 3D Profile Manager.
• Now select the revised text file.
• Closes the GeForce 3D Profile Manager.

If you follow this or the other guide above correctly, your graphics card should then reach its maximum graphics memory clock again with Discord. BTW: AMD users don’t seem to be affected by this issue.

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