game updates per second (UPS) drops during video conference

[db48x]

I occasionally use video conferencing, which entails recording video from a camera (which takes negligible system resources), encoding it using a modern codec (probably h.264, which takes non-negligible system resources), and sending it to a server or the other participants in the conference. If I'm running Factorio while I'm in a video conference, it's perfectly reasonable that both the video encoding and Factorio would contend for the same GPU resources; an FPS drop in Factorio would not be surprising. However, even if both the video conference and Factorio are maxing out one core of the CPU, there would still be plenty to go around. It is therefore quite surprising that the UPS would also drop.

I'm using Windows 7 running on an Intel i7 4790K, with an nVidia GTX 980 Ti. For video conferencing I most often use a WebRTC-based product such as https://appear.in/, which is running inside Firefox. Typically the FPS drops to 30 or 45fps (which as stated is not surprising), but the UPS also typically drops to 30 or 45ups. It's possible that there are browser settings or alternate products that would allow me to trade off increased bandwidth usage for decreased GPU usage for encoding, but I've not made an exhaustive search of these options. A quick test shows that Chrome is less likely to cause this, but I don't know if that's because it encodes using a different codec, or at a different resolution, etc.

Is it intentional that the UPS is limited to being no more than the FPS? It was my understanding that the two were entirely decoupled.

Oh, one other detail: I was the host of a multiplayer game at the time, with one other player in the game. It's perfectly reproducible in single-player though.

[Klonan]

Thanks for the report,

Can you post your system specs and a factorio log file?