NVIDIA GeForce Owners Report Gimped Memory Clocks While Gaming With Discord Open

We take them for granted, but modern computers are absolutely amazing. Have you ever considered how much work must have gone into making sure that you can have a half-dozen displays connected to one system, with varying DPI and refresh rates, displaying all different applications running concurrently on a single system? It's a ridiculously complex problem, so naturally, multitasking occasionally causes myriad issues.

This doesn't affect graphics core clocks, but it does have a negative effect on graphics memory clocks. Users on the LTT forums report VRAM clocks some 200-300 MHz lower than expected, depending on the model. That's a change in the final memory transfer rate, not the actual clock rate, so the difference is pretty small overall. Still, it's not great for your GPU to be running slower than it should for no real reason.


From there, you'll need to scroll down to find the "CUDA - Force P2 State" option, which is probably set to the default of "On"; simply click on it and use the drop-down to toggle the setting "off." Once that's done, click "Apply Changes" in the top right, and you should be good to go. This tweak accomplishes the exact same thing as NVIDIA's method, just in slightly fewer steps.

For what it's worth, this appears to be down to a change in the Discord application itself, and is not necessarily a bug. However, many users on Reddit (as well as your author, here) can confirm that Discord is indeed dropping GPU memory clocks, and that this quick tweak corrects them.