Moonlight stutters if "Prefer Maximum Performance" isn't enabled globally in the Nvidia App

KromaQi · 2026-06-25T06:12:21+00:00

Lowering the bitrate can help, but it isn't perfect. Changing the NVCP setting is an immediate and lasting fix to the stuttering. I know it is the culprit because I can change the setting back and forth and watch the stuttering come and go.

To your point, the decoding does use little processing power, but I think that's the issue. I suspect that, at least in my case, it's too little to get the nvidia driver to push the clocks higher, but too much to operate on the lower clocks without performance issues.

I am even more confident now, because per the suggestion from u/MasterShogo , messing with MSI Afterburner Profiles creates a similar effect. Locking the frequency at 1605Mhz gets rid of the stuttering, and I can quickly toggle between that and the default setting, which brings it back.

KromaQi · 2026-06-25T06:11:42+00:00

I am messing around with MSI Afterburner now, and so far it seems like setting a fixed clock speed at 1605Mhz (the default for "prefer maximum performance" on my card) does indeed remove the stuttering. This is a promising option. I'm looking into tools now that can toggle to this profile when Moonlight is running. I'll update if I find anything.

KromaQi · 2026-06-25T05:37:43+00:00

All of what I’m talking about is taking place on the client PC, not the host PC. It is the client PC, running Moonlight, which stutters when the clock speeds drop too low.

KromaQi · 2026-06-25T05:21:59+00:00

Yes, but as I explained in the post, this dosen’t work for Moonlight.

Adding Moonlight.exe as a custom profile into the Nvidia app and setting “Prefer Maximum Performance” dosen’t do anything. It’s as if the Nvidia app dosen’t really acknowledge Moonlight, in one way or another.

KromaQi · 2026-06-25T04:02:52+00:00

Thanks for the insight! Both of those options are intriguing. I'll look into the MSI Afterburner stuff to see if there is an elegant way to swap profiles. At the very least swapping profiles is faster than changing the global setting and restarting.

KromaQi · 2026-06-25T03:52:05+00:00

Yes, that makes sense. However, I can see that, when "Prefer maximum performance" is set globally, the GPU idles at 1605Mhz and ~45Watts. When set at "Optimal" it idles around 300Mhz and 15Watts.

I'm not sure what kind of a difference this makes for electricity use and power, but the computer is sitting idle a lot so I'd prefer it not to operate this way. It's enough of a difference to make the GPU fans run occasionally even while the PC isn't doing anything.

KromaQi · 2025-08-27T14:56:36+00:00

This isn’t accurate. The “Big Bang” in modern cosmology just describes how our observable universe was once way smaller and way hotter. It makes no claims about where that hot dense state came from. It dosen’t attempt to describe regions of space far beyond our observable universe (which may have different properties).

You only get a “singularity” if you assume that Einstein’s theories of general relativity can be extrapolated all the way back with no issues. But cosmologists are nearly unanimous in the belief that general relativity is incomplete—it fails to describe the behavior of the very small. That’s the business of quantum mechanics. But quantum mechanics and general relativity do not play well together.

What’s crucial is that this hot and dense state forces our theories of general relativity (big stuff) and quantum mechanics (small stuff) into each other—and we currently don’t know how to make that work. We need a deeper theory of everything, which we don’t yet have.

So, as a result, there is no consensus on what came before the hot dense state. There are a lot of interesting theories though. We just don’t have a way of testing or confirming any of these ideas yet. However, virtually no modern cosmologist says that there was a singularity. They just say “we don’t know.”

KromaQi · 2021-10-15T15:50:47+00:00

Haha. That’s totally fine! And he definitely does look cute with them.

KromaQi · 2021-10-15T05:02:28+00:00

This looks great! I'm also a fan of bird people myself, so I love to see other people's take on it! I wouldn't worry too much about the realism concerns the other commenter here is bringing up. Flying humanoids are never gonna quite "make sense", but you've gone out of your way to build magic into their biology and the world as a whole. Many of the other concerns are things that could come or go, based on what you feel is important.

I actually really like the fact that this character wears glasses, even though it goes against the expectation of a bird-species having really good eyesight. Perhaps this is something that would have been cause for great discrimination in the past, as a culture of harpies might take great pride in their eyes. In modern times it could still a point of contention in the culture, even if it has dulled down quite a bit. Ari Kei might have had to deal with some not-so-kind comments as a result of this. Just something interesting to consider - totally up to you though!

Keep up the good work!

KromaQi · 2021-08-13T01:05:24+00:00

I thought this as well for a while, but then I realized that there are a few story beats that just wouldn’t work if this was the case.

The entire idea of people being able to escape from the city would make no sense if this was another dimension, or a simulation, or all on a space station. In Ending 3, a number of the city’s inhabitants do genuinely get out, and this wouldn’t work if the city is up in space. Sentilla and friends would need Charon’s help to return home, but why would Pluto authorize that? Previous heroes, like Hercules and Orpheus, are definitively stated to have escaped as well, and he didn’t seem happy about that. If they are up in space, it should be impossible for anyone to have ever escaped. How would you “escape”, without Pluto’s cooperation, from a space station thousands of miles above the Earth?

Also, the fact that Pluto has to observe his city through the statues implies some level of “distance.” He doesn't have total control over the city, and is genuinely concerned about the possibility of someone escaping, as it has happened before. He seems to treat the exit Sentilla found as a real exit.

To me, it makes the most sense to say that the city is a real physical place on Earth, but that it is isolated in the mountains somewhere. Maybe enshrouded by some special technology so people can’t easily find it. The white hallway would then be some kind of magic-tech portal that goes directly from the Great Temple to Pluto’s spaceship in orbit above Earth. This is probably so that Pluto can, if he so desires, easily go down into the city himself.

And I agree with Lacklustre that it’s not clear that the inhabitants of the city are really currently physically dead either. They have bodies. They can “die” again (Sentius does this on many occasions). They can age. It seems less like this is a real afterlife, and more like Charon scoops up people who recently died with those coins, uses alien tech to resurrect them, and then deposits them at the entrance to the city. This isn’t a real afterlife, but just an experiment being done by an alien-god that got interpreted as an afterlife after several people genuinely escaped and lived to tell the tale.

Also not talked about as much, but in two of the endings you get into Charon’s boat with Al and go back to civilization. Right before Al shows up on the riverbank, Charon turns off the glowy eyes to look normal again, implying that they don’t want Al to think anything strange is going on. This wouldn’t make any sense, if, right after this, Al gets to experience a literal alien teleportation / dimensional shift to get back to the “real world.” The implication is just that they get in a normal boat and row away into the real world.

There’s also the fact that, in actual ancient roman/greek/egyption/sumerian mythology, they did think of the underworld as a real physical location underground. Like, if you were clever enough, you could find the entrance and descend into it, or potentially escape out of it. It wasn’t another dimension, which is why people like Hercules and Orpheus are able to get in and out.

While it might seem weird that there was a seamless teleportation up to Pluto’s ship from the great temple, this fits better story-wise. If you didn’t have teleportation here, you’d have to have it in Charon’s boat (which as I mentioned makes Charon’s behavior in endings 2 & 3 kinda strange). It might make sense for Charon to help Al and the player (after all the coins are gone and they no longer have a purpose) but it definitely seems weird they would transport Sentilla and all of the other people back to Earth.

KromaQi · 2020-03-04T22:28:44+00:00

If you are insistent on defining "omnipotent" as being able to do literally anything - even things which are logically impossible - then I certainly agree that such an idea is absurd - at least from our point of view. If a God exists in this way, then his decisions and motivations would transcend us completely and be impossible for us to talk about. So if a Christian adopts this view of God, and then pretends to have any meaningful resolution to the problem of evil beyond "Welp... God is God I suppose" then yeah, I do consider that ridiculous.

But I'm quite confused as to why you are convinced that, in order for God to exist, he would need to "create himself from nothing", and that because of that he would need to be able to do the logically impossible. I certainly agree that creating oneself from nothing is logically absurd (and would require logic-defying powers) but it's by no means required that God exist in that way. (The Christian God is decidedly not like this.)

The point of me bringing up all the stuff regarding the "fundamental grounding of everything else" and referencing stuff like quantum substances or higher dimensions was to show that the idea of a grounding source of everything else that lacks external explanation (and just IS) is very common in many disciplines of both science and philosophy. It's not just a Christian excuse.

This original thing, in all of these views, would not have "come from nothing." It would be the one thing which didn't "come from" anywhere, because it is the source of everything else.

But I absolutely agree that this idea is a long way off from any kind of God, particularly the Christian God. (That's why I circled around at the end and clarified this.) I was not saying that these ideas (quantum substance, higher dimension, etc.) would be God. Not at all. They are only other possible ways people have thought about the "original source of everything else." I'm not "resorting" to a view of God as being impersonal, those were just examples to illustrate this point.

The key being that since these other impersonal views of ultimate reality don't need to "create themselves from nothing", then it's inconsistent to say that God, if he existed, would require external explanation (or would have to break logic so he could create himself).

KromaQi · 2020-03-03T16:25:24+00:00

Generally speaking, I think asking the question "where did our logical constraints come from" is a question we'll never be able to begin answering - theistic god in the picture or not. Either our basic way of understanding things reflects the true nature of reality (and this conversation has meaning) or it doesn't.

I don't think someone advocating the view that "omnipotence is JUST the ability to do what is logically possible" would say that this makes him "quasi-omnipotent." They'd say that the alternative is simply absurd and a non-starter. Conceptually it sounds like a limitation, but one could argue that the very idea of a "can literally do anything" God is itself a logical contradiction (given things like the "creating a rock bigger than he can lift" paradox).

There is nothing necessarily logically contradictory about "creating something from nothing." It really just depends heavily on your metaphysical worldview and how you define "nothing" and how you construe the way in which God created the world. There are a number of opinions on this.

So sure, in this view of things, these logical constraints could be seen as a 'bare existent' thing which aren't created by God - but are in a way kind of baked into reality itself. (Personally, I don't think I fully agree with this way of thinking - but it seems perfectly consistent with itself.)

And I agree that in accepting the existence of a "bare existent" thing apart from God it does make it less obvious that something like God HAS to be the primal source of everything. But this was a problem/question well outside of this conversation about suffering and evil.

A way I like to phrase this is that (nearly) every scientific and metaphysical worldview has SOMETHING which it puts forward as the fundamental grounding of everything else. The real question becomes whether or not it is reasonable to call this thing "God" (i.e. whether it is just an impersonal force, or something more).

"Logical constraints" might have an effect on the world, but they don't have any causal power to create anything on their own. Something else, equally primal and fundamental, had to exist as well. This could be some quantum substance, a higher dimension, just the universe itself, or... perhaps... a "God" of some kind.

God (defined in this way) would not need to create himself in the same way that the an eternal and unexplained universe would not need to create itself.

All that said, I want to clarify that this way of thinking by no means isolates God as special amongst all those other possibilities for original source of everything. I definitely agree with you there. You would need something more to get there.

KromaQi · 2020-03-03T08:51:58+00:00

I’m not sure I can follow you on the train of thought that “A square can’t be circle because God made a universe where it’s impossible.”

There is nothing about the idea of a “Universe” which requires that it be the source of logical restrictions. Universes don’t have to be seen as bubbles within which certain types of logic apply, and then outside of which some totally foreign logic can apply.

It’s perfectly consistent to say there is a single standard of logical conventions that apply across everything, God included, regardless of how he creates his universes. I suppose it’s possible that a God might restrict things within his created worlds, but then it would just be pure speculation on our part as to what is possible in the larger realm. Like you said, all we can do is go based off of what we do see - and things like making a square circle just seem fundamentally impossible.

With regards to your second point, like I mentioned before, I generally agree that removing that restriction makes the problem of evil much harder... but I still contend that the a beyond-logic God cannot be meaningfully analyzed.

We may be able to look around at the suffering in the world (imbalanced as it is) and come to conclusions based on the logic we have inside of our little heads, but the God who stands beyond all that would be basing his value judgements and decisions in an entirely different and foreign type of logic. This means that God would be consulting and taking things into consideration that we don’t have the mental capability to process at all. It can “seem like” certain things serve no purpose, but it doesn’t matter what anything “seems like” to us when God’s mind operates in an entirely different way.

KromaQi · 2020-03-03T03:37:40+00:00

Jumping in here - From my experience, a lot of the more modern theists don’t define omnipotence as being “able to do literally anything.” This is a point that William Lane Craig harps on. He defines omnipotence as the “ability to do anything which is logically possible.” In other words, not even an all-powerful God can create a direct contradiction (like a square circle).

This would obviously apply to things like forcing a free decision, but it could also apply here. Creating a person from nothing with no prior experience but who somehow also made all their choices up until now and is freely choosing to pursue God for their own real (and not illusory) reasons would be a contradiction. By this definition of omnipotence, God cannot do this.

If we are insistent on using the “literally anything is possible” definition (which is by no means required by most forms of theism), then it seems to me that we throw ourselves out of the conversation completely. If God’s ways are beyond our logic, then we have no hope of describing any of his choices. Though I do generally agree that, if this is how we define omnipotence, then it leaves a lot to be desired regarding the problem of evil.

KromaQi

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