Power stream performance is worse than Neo

[ivory thunder]

I recently subscribed to the Power plan. I already have a Neo and I wanted to take advantage of the recent deal to get higher performance VM.

The Power VM is unable to maintain a constant 60fps on the stream to my host machine causing constant frame drops and stuttering. The VM itself is able to render the game perfectly, reporting 60fps and higher on in-game fps trackers, however when streaming the Shadow PC screen to my host machine, it constantly is spiking.

Take a look at the attached image for the stream chart.

It constantly fluctuates between 40fps - 60fps every 2 seconds.

The VM itself is capable of rendering games at 2K resolution, but the stream frames itself suffer. However if I reduce it to 1080p, the stream begins to behave fine. This does not happen on my weaker NEO shadow where even running 2K I am able to get a stable 60fps.

I have updated all NVidia drivers and tweaked all settings. And I have been back and forth with Shadow support for weeks now and they are trying to get rid of me. They keep rotating support agents and repeating the same advice (reduce bandwidth, update drivers, turn on/off h.265, etc.) and don't comment on my own debugging observations. I am basically doing the debugging for them and giving them as much data and evidence as possible but they ignore it. They don't even acknowledge the problem that I've described to them, showing that the VM itself can render, but the stream cannot. Constantly dodging my questions and request for comment or acknowledgement of the problem.

Has anyone else experienced this?
Any solutions?

I would highly advise AGAINST getting Power until this issue is handled.

Running on iMac 2021.
I am wired ethernet on 1gbps.
Behaviour same on official, beta and alpha versions.

[storm meteor]

cmd+alt+o and cmd+alt+i and show a screenshot of your VM while playing high fps content in fullscreen please

iMac 2021 should be an M1 so you should be good regardless the codec and chroma subsampling used, so it's most likely not an issue with that

[storm meteor]

and post a few screenshots or a small video of it

[ivory thunder]

the screenshot above is during game running on fullscreen, i'm messaging away from shadow, what other information does cmd+alt+i show?

Here is a previous screenshot that is fullscreen. Notice in the top left hand corner the in-game fps counter reads 59fps, always hovering around 60fps, compare with that of the stream frames

I will get the cmd+alt+i screenshots when i can

[storm meteor]

this is quickmenu, debug overlay is showing after cmd+alt+i on the top right side of the stream

[ivory thunder]

ah i see that would be helpful

[storm meteor]

debug overlay shows latency, packet loss and breakdown acquisition-encoding-decoding-rendering latency

this way you can see, in some cases, where exatly the issue is in the video streaming pipeline.

[ivory thunder]

i managed to get a clip but i had to compress it to send here (i dont have nitro) i hope the values are still visible

you will be able to compare the debug logs also with the top left in-game fps counter if that helps

you are already much more helpful than shadow support in helping with debugging! they did not even mention this debug overlay once in the weeks i have been in contact with them...

footage from 5 minutes ago, behaviour has changed, the encoding frames is significantly dropped compared with acquiring frames

nothing has changed between the two videos i've shown you

except 10 minutes has passed

[ivory thunder]

closing and re-opening the stream makes the behaviour go back to that shown in the first video

[storm meteor]

Looks like encoding issue right, some scenes are really hard to encode, so i would suggest to reduce background details for now, I’ll look a bit more in détail later, I am at a wedding dinner atm ;)

[ivory thunder]

thank you dearly alex for taking a look, HAVE FUN AT THE WEDDING!!!! that definitely comes first 😉

[storm meteor]

yes, that's most likely the nvidia encoder struggling to properly encode in time the scene, you have sadly a only a few options to help :

• lower resolution
• reduce bitrate
• reduce game settings (background animation/quality)

[ivory thunder]

ah so theres a specific nvidia software that shadow uses to encode and stream the frames to my host machine?

then it must be an incompatibility between the os version and the nvidia software version, since I'm not having any of these issues on my second shadow which is Neo

side note, the shadow support finally decided to take me seriously and they've started to examine the logs between the two shadows i have and acknowledged that the problem seems to exist yet it isn't immediately visible where the problem lies

[storm meteor]

Power tier is beefier for raw performance but the nvenc components is more performant on Neo as it is newer and especially at higher resolution

Nvenc is the onboard chip doing the video encoding

[ivory thunder]

ah so the neo has a specific hardware component that power does not?

and that component being nvenc is more powerful because they included it in the newer neo tiers and the power tiers dont have them because they are older?

very interesting! thanks for the insights, how did you know these details?

you are much more helpful than shadow support!!! even they are clueless about these things 😄

it seems like a major mistake or crazy overlooked if they dont provide the components required to effectively encode higher resolution streams on a naturally higher-performing machine that will naturally also handle higher resolutions 🫣

[storm meteor]

it really depends on content complexity really... nvenc can encode up to 8k for a few years now

but like everything newer version of the nvenc chip may improve too over time

[ivory thunder]

what do u mean by content complexity? does it not simply take the pixels drawn on screen and encodes it? I thought that the rendering happens in a different process and then whatever is rendered is then taken afterwards to be encoded and streamed, meaning its always just pixels no matter what. Is that incorrect?

the shadow struggles with 2k resolution

so just asking again, sorry, the nvenc chipset/version will be a hardware component shipped specifically per shadow vm alongside cpu/gpu/ram/etc.?

[storm meteor]

nvenc (Nvidia Encoder) is the name of the software using hardware component of nvidia GPU's (available in different generation with different specs and performance), it's part of the GPU, it can't be changed or replaced. Shadow works fine with most content up to 3840x2160, video encoders doesn't encode pixels but macroblocks, it's a lot more complicated (tranformation/prediction/encoding) and not part of the subject. But let's say some scenes (in video/games) are harder to encode than others and sometimes encoder doesn't perform well, it's the same for all encoders (OBS / StreamLabs / .... ), moving grass for example...