Game Lag White Paper › L2 Client OS and device

Overlay software interference Overlays and screen hooks

Cause ID co-overlay · Primary owner External (External) · Also Game team (Client development)

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Chat apps, launchers, recording tools, and FPS counters hook into the game’s rendering to draw their own UI on top of the game screen (hooking). That adds work to every frame and sometimes clashes with the game, causing hitches or crashes.

Why Overlays from chat apps, game launchers, graphics card tools, or recording software are turned on → Effect Every time a frame goes out to the screen, the overlay steps in and draws its own UI on top → On screen Frames get slightly later, and when a notification pops up the game hitches, shows graphics glitches, or crashes (looks like a disconnect to the player)

Symptoms

Stutter, Freeze, Disconnect

Factors

Stall

Who’s affected

Just me

When

Always, Randomly

Owner

Primary owner External (External) · Also Game team (Client development)

Game team action items

Collect the list of running overlays along with crash reports and stutter logs.

External action items

When reports come in, tell players to turn off all overlays and test again.

On the graph

Outliers only · Frame time and crash count (players with overlays on)

Where to look

Turn off all overlays and compare PresentMon frame time in the same scene; for crashes, check the faulting module name (Faulting module name) in Event Viewer Event ID 1000

Confirmed if

Hitches and graphics glitches go away with overlays off, or the faulting module in the crash is an overlay program’s DLL

Ruled out if

Same with every overlay off: the graphics driver or “Client crash”

Check with

The player’s own environment

Learn more

When only certain players stutter or crash and their specs don’t explain it, suspect a conflict between an overlay and the anti-cheat module first.

Sources

1. Steam Overlay (Steamworks Documentation) Valve
   The Steam overlay automatically hooks into games launched through Steam, and because of how it does that, it can expose memory errors in the game’s use of the rendering API and cause crashes
2. PresentMon Capture Application (README-CaptureApplication.md) Intel
   Records per-frame time as FrameTime (CPU time between frames)
3. The application or service crashing behavior troubleshooting guidance Microsoft
   Event ID 1000 in the Application log includes the faulting module name (Faulting module name); a Windows module sometimes shows up as the faulting module because of corruption caused by another module

See also

Same layer: L2 Client OS and device

• Background processes taking up CPU
• Power saving and thermal throttling
• Timer resolution
• Mobile app sent to the background
• Wi-Fi ↔ LTE/5G switching
• Packet inspection by security software
• Receive buffer overflow
• Client low on memory and swapping
• Out of graphics memory (VRAM)
• Wi-Fi background scanning
• NIC power saving and driver issues
• Other apps on the same device using up bandwidth
• Throttling when the window is minimized or unfocused
• Display, input device, and frame generation latency

Same symptom (Stutter), other layers

• Frame time spike L1 Client game process
• Client garbage collection L1 Client game process
• Synchronous loading and shader compilation on the main thread L1 Client game process
• Slow storage delays asset streaming L1 Client game process
• Rendering load from large crowds L1 Client game process
• Missing or too-short interpolation buffer L1 Client game process
• Excessive extrapolation (dead reckoning) L1 Client game process
• Fixed-timestep catch-up spiral L1 Client game process

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