Game Overlays impact on input latency.

[soul4kills]

Game app overlays work by hooking into the games render path to draw its overlay onto the game. This can add latency.

Windows has an overlay with gamebar. Steam has an overlay. Discord has an overlay. Nvidia drivers has an overlay. AMD's graphics drivers has overlays.

Stack all these up, you have increased your latency in the render path. Disable all these overlays to reduce your render latency.

Hope this helps.

[Katzenwerfer_MX]

How do you know? It could be safe to assume the overlays just stay inert until they are called by whatever input they hook.

[soul4kills]

https://hdopti.com/articles/how-overlay ... ps-latency

Here's a good read.

I think it's safe to assume that it "will" add latency whether it is active or not. Because any type of interception of the input/output path will always add latency. Your suggestion that it stays inert is completely wrong. Why? well because it's always doing background work to get things ready to be drawn and to actively hook into the render path. A better argument would be if the latency impact is lower or higher if it's actively drawing into the frame. And if it's actually worth turning off vs how much impact it has.

Either way, will it fix your latency issues? IDK. Latency tweaking is a process of reduction. It's not a one tweak fix. It's a layered approach of "reducing" the settings/utilities or apps that increase latency. This is one area where latency can be reduced. I'm only making people aware of it. Whether you want to utilize the information presented is up to you. Hopefully that clears it up for ya.

edit: Here's a hardware unboxed video where they test out nvidia's overlay.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBW_3tArLOY

[DudeBeFishing]

All overlays have caused problems for me at some point. The worst was the Steam overlay. It used to cause Rust to load really slow. I couldn't join servers with it enabled.

If Microsoft wants to improve Windows, add a single checkbox that blocks all in-game overlays.