Network Thread Congestion: Severe Ping Spikes and Frame Drops Only During Character Movement

[xyra080-code]

What happened?

Hi Developer,

I found a specific performance bottleneck in OpenNOW where the stream lags drastically only when the character or camera moves, whereas the official GeForce NOW client runs perfectly smooth at the exact same configuration and maximum bitrate.

The Symptom:

• When standing completely still: The stream is smooth, ping is low, and FPS is stable.
• The moment I move the character or rotate the camera: Ping spikes to unplayable levels and the stream suffers severe frame drops.

Technical Investigation:
Since the official client handles maximum bitrate without any performance drops on this specific low-end device, custom UI/HUD rendering is likely not the bottleneck.

The issue heavily points toward Network Thread Congestion or a Thread Blocking flaw. During camera movement, the sudden spike in incoming WebRTC video data seems to block or delay the outgoing input packet queue on the main network thread, leading to buffer bloat and artificial ping spikes.

Suggested Fixes for Codebase:
Please look into the networking/streaming loop architecture:

1. Ensure the outgoing input handling system runs on an isolated high-priority thread to prevent incoming video packet bursts from delaying input transmission.
2. Implement better packet throttling or non-blocking asynchronous socket queues during intra-frame data spikes.

Thank you for your hard work on this amazing project! Hope this insight helps improve stability for network packet handling.

Operating System

Android

GeForce NOW Tier

Free

Logs (required)

No exported log file available, but the issue occurs consistently during heavy intra-frame motion decoding on low-end hardware.

Screenshots (optional)

No response

[lunaseraphica]

What happened?

Hi Developer,

I found a specific performance bottleneck in OpenNOW where the stream lags drastically only when the character or camera moves, whereas the official GeForce NOW client runs perfectly smooth at the exact same configuration and maximum bitrate.

The Symptom:

• When standing completely still: The stream is smooth, ping is low, and FPS is stable.
• The moment I move the character or rotate the camera: Ping spikes to unplayable levels and the stream suffers severe frame drops.

Technical Investigation: Since the official client handles maximum bitrate without any performance drops on this specific low-end device, custom UI/HUD rendering is likely not the bottleneck.

The issue heavily points toward Network Thread Congestion or a Thread Blocking flaw. During camera movement, the sudden spike in incoming WebRTC video data seems to block or delay the outgoing input packet queue on the main network thread, leading to buffer bloat and artificial ping spikes.

Suggested Fixes for Codebase: Please look into the networking/streaming loop architecture:

1. Ensure the outgoing input handling system runs on an isolated high-priority thread to prevent incoming video packet bursts from delaying input transmission.
2. Implement better packet throttling or non-blocking asynchronous socket queues during intra-frame data spikes.

Thank you for your hard work on this amazing project! Hope this insight helps improve stability for network packet handling.

Operating System

Android

GeForce NOW Tier

Free

Logs (required)

No exported log file available, but the issue occurs consistently during heavy intra-frame motion decoding on low-end hardware.

Screenshots (optional)

No response

I have this exact issue, but on pc. I already reported this to them on their discord server, I hope it'll be fixed..

[DarkevilPT]

You are on the free tier. What do you expect? Nvidia is going to give you whatever hardware is available, which is usually the least powerful machines. You cannot expect top performance all the time.

If you were paying for a subscription, your point would make more sense because you would have higher expectations for performance and quality. On the free tier, however, fidelity and performance are never guaranteed.

[lunaseraphica]

Spreading misinformation is wild. You clearly did not read a shit from the post. This frame drop and ping spike never happens on the gfn app, only opennow, get your facts straight. And this is due to webrtc shit; they don't use what geforcenow now uses, and geforcenow now app uses geronimo, not electron, and they also use NVST + custom udp stuff, even zortos mentioned what gfn client uses in comparison to opennow.

[DarkevilPT]

Fair play then... Idk..

[xyra080-code]

So bro, at least read a little first before you give your opinion.

[zortos293]

this issue has been happening to me aswell it looks like due to no compression still looking into this issue

This year is primarily happening for me on Forza Horizon 5 because it's very demanding game

[lunaseraphica]

for me it's been happening on pretty much every game, which does not happen on geforce now, but then there is a even stranger question.. on the mobile version of opennow, it all works fine without network lag or anything(at least for me), however on pc it lags.

[zortos293]

for me it's been happening on pretty much every game, which does not happen on geforce now, but then there is a even stranger question.. on the mobile version of opennow, it all works fine without network lag or anything(at least for me), however on pc it lags.

The code base of mobile is different than the PC port.

[lunaseraphica]

Oh, thought it's the same, just that it's backported or smth. Thanks for telling!

[zortos293]

No problem. The Android and iOS builds are fully native, built specifically for the OS.

[zortos293]

The desktop version is aimed at cross-platform compatibility so that it works on Mac, Windows, and Linux.