Youtube in the background

[goku26505]

Having a strange issue that I'd like to get some insight on. If I have youtube open in the background, not running, just open, my frame rates drop in games by approximately half. For instance, if I am playing SWTOR and youtube is open with no videos playing, my framerates will hover in the 20-35 range depending on location. If I close out the youtube tab/window, they will immediately shoot up to 45-60 range. This only happens with youtube open. I can have 5+ browers windows open, winamp, etc. and virtually no affect in-game. I have noticed similar results in TERA but unable to quantify the fps decrease.

My system is as follows:

I5-2500k @ 4.4
ASRock Z28 Extreme 3 Gen 3
8 gig GSkill Sniper Ram @ 1600
Corsair 650TX PSU
Asus 5770 @ 1920X1080 (Waiting on final Nvidia offerings/Final AMD price drops)

Any thoughts as to why just having the browser open and no videos running would cause this result?

 

[kelthic]

This is a problem with flash the window with youtube is open. Some have mentioned updating drivers for the video card and chipsets help. Some have mentioned the latest flash readers help. Some have mentioned switching Windows aero off or swtiching to windows basic theme help.

 

[Guest]

try turning off the hardware acceleration for flash and see if it continues.

 

[photonboy]

I suppose it's possible that SWTOR is using the video hardware acceleration chip on your graphics card and that it conflicts with the FLASH usage.

Most current cards with hardware acceleration can only accelerate one stream at a time.

For example, I can accelerate two videos on my video card. If I open two Blu-Ray ripped movies at the SAME time they run great. If I add a third they all stutter since the program is told to use hardware acceleration (WMP-HC) but it can't really.

If I DISABLE hardware acceleration so it uses the CPU I can keep opening videos until my CPU runs out of processing (had 12 movies running at the same time).

SUMMARY:
- probably get fixed in a patch for SWTOR
- close your browsers when gaming

(It would be interesting to see if disabling Windows Aero, i.e. Windows Classic theme makes a difference in any games. Windows Aero can use up to 200MB of VRAM. Most have 1024MB of VRAM. However I don't know if this causes an issue in practice since Windows probably leaves Aero using your VRAM until you run out of space and it then deletes content so your game has more space.

I'm investigating this issue currently with Crysis which can use most of my 1024MB of VRAM.)