So I have a fairly specific problem that has been surprisingly hard to troubleshoot for some reason.
Very specifically, when I am streaming on discord, while any game software is running, (we've tried it with a few different ones, online/offline, steam/non-steam, 2D graphics vs 3D graphics. Same issue although maybe with varying amounts of time before the problem starts, but hard to be sure.) and when at least one other person starts watching the stream, my discord connection gets unstable. Voice and video start cutting in and out and the connection icon starts turning red. This doesn't just affect the person watching the stream, others have trouble hearing me as well. No stream? No problem. Stream but no game? No problem. Stream and game but no viewer? No problem. Just when all of these are together. Also this doesn't seem to impact my other processes or connections. The game keeps running like normal and for the online ones they don't lose connection. I can still go access sites on my browser, etc.
I got a new PC recently, I haven't had this issue before that. It didn't happen right away though, things worked fine at first. It happened for the first time a few weeks ago and after running through the basic troubleshooting steps, the thing that seemed to fix the issue was updating my nvidia graphics drivers, but it's hard to say for sure. The problem popped up again tonight. For reference the last time I streamed to someone was on Thursday, so it was working very recently.
I checked and there was a graphics driver update, so I went to install that, thinking that would fix it again. It did not. There also seemed to be some problems around the graphics driver installer. Both times this happened the download initially stalled at some % and I had to restart to get it to work again. Plus this time I went to try to reinstall the graphics driver to see if maybe the first time it didn't do it right and I briefly had bigger problems with the PC. During the install, the screen just went dark and didn't come back. The rest of the computer was running, I could still chat on discord, but I had to kill it and restart to get the screen back. That restart took a while longer than normal and when I got back the start menu wasn't working. That got fixed on another restart though.
Anyway, that's concerning and maybe relevant, but back to the discord issue: Other troubleshooting steps that didn't work:
- Turning hardware acceleration off/on.
- Telling windows to use my graphics card on high performance for discord and the games I was testing with. (It already seemed to be doing that on it's own anyway, but I made sure.)
- Lowering stream quality and FPS.
- Making sure discord was added to my firewall allowed software.
- Cleared discord's cache.
- uninstalled and reinstalled discord.
- Checked for windows or other driver updates and didn't find any.
- Tried switching routers and did some speed tests that turned out fine.
- Checked resource usage and nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
I'm kind of at a loss here. The most I can turn up on google is all the generic troubleshooting advice you get for every problem and none of it has worked so far.
System Info:
- Windows 11
- It's a Lenovo prebuilt desktop PC and it comes with their driver/system management software.
- Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-14700F, 2100 Mhz, 20 Core(s), 28 Logical Processor(s)
- BIOS Version/Date LENOVO O5TKT3BA, 12/17/2024
- Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 32.0 GB
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER
- Headphones/mic: Razor Blackshark V2 Pro
Any ideas?