Comms app Discord is a notorious resource hog. So, news that a resource-light "Game Mode" for Discord is in the works is definitely welcome. The catch? Early sightings indicate the new mode will reduce "Discord's CPU and GPU usage while a game is running." Notably, there's no specific mention of reducing the app's memory footprint. Doh!
First mentioned by the unofficial Discord Previews X account and then confirmed by Discord itself, Game Mode "will automatically reduce animations and disable effects when it detects a game being played, freeing up CPU and GPU resources that might help your game run smoother."
Of course, as many observers note, arguably the biggest issue here is the basis of Discord on Electron, a framework for desktop applications that uses Chromium, the latter being the same core technology that powers the Chrome browser—itself not exactly known for its efficient use of resources like memory.
Late last year, Discord addressed long standing issues with Discord using excess memory. It even implemented a feature that restarted the app when the memory footprint exceeded 4 GB.
At the time, the Discord rep said on Reddit that the measure was not meant to be permanent. However, it's still there as far as we know.
Our own investigation into the impact of Discord on gaming frame rates found that maybe the problem wasn't so bad after all. Our Nick concluded, "I have to say, I can't see any serious issues at all."
However, that investigation was more about how Discord's process priorities are handled by default. Nick found that it wasn't much of a problem, but that it was easy enough to demote Discord process priorities in Task Manager if you were getting micro stutters from having it running in the background during games.
Arguably more of a worry, especially in the current context with memory prices spiralling ever higher, is RAM usage. And this new Game Mode doesn't seem to address that at all.
At best we can point to the throw-away comment at the bottom of Discord's X announcement on the matter, which reads, "aiming to add more resource-saving features over time." Here's hoping reducing that memory footprint is now the number one priority.
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