Stutters in games when using NoMachine Enterprise Client

[paranoidroid]

Using NoMachine Enterprise Client 8.14.2 on my Windows 11 gaming machine to connect to a work machine with CentOS 7 and the same version of NoMachine server. Window manager on CentOS 7 is GNOME.

I noticed that I can not game while NoMachine Enterprise Client is connected to a remote machine. I am getting periodic stutters in games. For example, if I’m running the D3D11 game GRIP without NoMachine Enterprise Client being connected, I get constant 158 FPS (using a 165 Hz VRR display). If NoMachine Enterprise Client is connected to a remote machine I get periodic stutters or slowdowns where I get 158 FPS for a couple of seconds then that drops to some low number like 45 FPS or so for a period of half a second, then it’s back at full FPS and so on and so forth. If I disconnect NoMachine Enterprise Client, everything normalizes again.

It does not help if I minimize NoMachine Enterprise Client. It does not help if I turn on/off hardware acceleration on either side of the NoMachine connection.

I can not solve this myself.

I am thinking of a possible workaround, though… What if NoMachine Enterprise Client would not do any draw calls to the GPU while it is minimized? Maybe that would prevent such issues at least for cases where it is enough minimizing NoMachine Enterprise Client.

For cases where both NoMachine Enterprise Client and a game are desired to run in a non-minimized window, this is not a solution.

I wonder why NoMachine Enterprise Client has such a huge impact? Running two games in parallel is nowhere near as bad as the scenario with NoMachine Enterprise Client and a game. In fact, in the case of running two windowed games in windows side by side (I tested with one D3D11 and the other one D3D12) they share the resources perfectly, no stutters, only a bit lower FPS on both games, no stutters or dramatic slowdowns as with NoMachine Enterprise Client.

[Britgirl]

Hi, can you tell us how you disabled HW acceleration on the client and server machines? Hardware encoding is disabled for the server in the server settings of the UI i.e the NoMachine server won’t perform encoding in the session. But hardware decoding is disabled in the session menu or in the player.cfg which is located on the machine you are connecting from. When you are connected to the desktop with NoMachine, open the menu (Ctrl-Alt-0) > Display > Change settings > Options, button Modify (https://kb.nomachine.com/DT09T00267#5.8), click the box next to ‘Disable client side hardware decoding’. Does that make any difference?

[paranoidroid]

@Britgirl, I can not reproduce the issue anymore and I don’t know why that is. I made no changes to my Windows, NoMachine on either client or server side. Now it’s just working fine all the time.

Weirdest of all is that when I had the problems I changed the hardware encoding/decoding, rebooted both machines, etc. and the problem was always the same. Now it’s gone for some reason… I checked the Windows Update history and the only thing that updated since 7 Jan 2025 when I reported the problem is Windows Security definitions… I don’t know if that is it or not though.

[paranoidroid]

My Client and Server just got updated to 8.15.3 and now the problem is back again. Same as it was before… and since I don’t know what fixed it the last time, I don’t know what to do now…

[Britgirl]

It sounds like an issue with your system set-up or even network. Please update to NoMachine 8.16. If you are still experiencing stuttering, disable HW decoding. When you are connected to the desktop with NoMachine, open the menu (Ctrl-Alt-0) > Display > Change settings > Options, button Modify (https://kb.nomachine.com/DT09T00267#5.8), click the box next to ‘Disable client side hardware decoding’. Does that make any difference?

[paranoidroid]

Britgirl, using 8.16.1 now and I needed to disable client side hardware decoding. With this it is now working OK. I would prefer if I would understand why it worked when it did with enabled client side hardware decoding, but this will also do, as the software decoding doesn’t really impact my system.

So, solved, but not understood (yet).

[Britgirl]

I’m not sure I understand the question LOL You want to want know why the connection was not stuttering with NoMachine’s HW decoding in its default setting (i.e Enabled)? It’s meant to work that way 🙂 What we don’t know is why the stuttering suddenly stopped and started again.

But we now know that disabling HW decoding has removed the stuttering, we can say that it’s most likely a problem with your video card and/or driver, so there’s no further investigation required.

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