Watching Videos Via Steam Lags My Whole PC

[Good Night Owl]

I've got an unusual problem today. I can watch videos outside of Steam just fine, but the moment I try to do it on steam, it doesn't just lag Steam, it lags my entire PC, while a green, colorful, horizontal stripe occasionally appears across the screen for like less than half a second. I kept my task manager open while it was happening to see if there's an overload or something, and nothing comes up, even after waiting.

What do?

So far, I've tried reinstalling all the drivers (the lazy way, I just installed them. I didn't uninstall what I had first)

I also did some Windows updates, and returned BIOS settings to default since I tweaked them a bit.

And finally, I reinstalled Steam.

The problem still persists.

[Ettanin]

Steam uses hardware acceleration. It sounds like your GPU is on its last legs.

[Good Night Owl]

Originally posted by Ettanin:

Steam uses hardware acceleration. It sounds like your GPU is on its last legs.

It's brand new. Well not really, but I just bought it fresh out of the box.

[Crazy Tiger]

That green horizontal stripe is a good indicator your GPU is having trouble or the drivers aren't ok. You can try to disable hardware acceleration in the settings of Steam. You can also reinstall the GPU drivers the proper way.

Originally posted by Good Night Owl:

Originally posted by Ettanin:

Steam uses hardware acceleration. It sounds like your GPU is on its last legs.

It's brand new. Well not really, but I just bought it fresh out of the box.

That doesn't mean it can't have issues. Hardware can fail right out of the box if something wasn't right during production.

[Ogami]

Originally posted by Good Night Owl:

It's brand new. Well not really, but I just bought it fresh out of the box.

Can still be defect. Colorful horizontal stripes is usually a bad sign.
I would recommend downloading some GPU benchmark programs and let it run some stress benchmarks for a hour or so. If no problem appears then fine, its something else.
But if it also happens then you should return the GPU.

[Good Night Owl]

Alright, I'm gonna try all the things you guys suggested. Disabling GPU acceleration has fixed the symptom, but it hasn't fixed my heart... Meaning I'm still worried about the implication of it.

[Cathulhu]

You should be.
Either your videodriver is broken, or the videocard is.

[Good Night Owl]

I did a stress test. I ran it for about 20 minutes. The average lowest heat was about 75c, and the high was averaging 85C-87C. A little hot for my comfort, but nothing that made me think videos on Steam should be slowing down my entire pc.

What fixed it for me (for now at least) was FULLY reinstalling the drivers. My lazy just install over what I have didn't work, but I was able to turn hardware acceleration back on after fully uninstalling, then later reinstalling the graphics drivers properly.

[Crazy Tiger]

Yeah, a lazy install can lead to corruption. Good thing you did a proper install of the drivers and that it solved it. Keep an eye out, of course, but I hope this indeed fixes it.