Abysmal performance when scrolling playlists

[Aquaschaf]

Plan

Premium

Country

Germany

Device

Ryzen 2700X, Geforce GTX 1080

Operating System

Windows 10

My Question or Issue

All recent versions of Spotify show such horrible performance when scrolling in longer playlists, that the Windows desktop app has become annyoing to use. There is noticeable lag if a playlist contains 50+ songs. If one tries to browse or example all local music, i.e. a list with a few thousand items, then it can literally take several seconds, until after scrolling the song titles actually show up. During scrolling it manages to use one core of my CPU completely, and reaches about 25% GPU load in the Windows task manager.

Rebooting, re-installing the app, clearing its caches, and enabling/disabling HW acceleration all make no difference. Graphics drivers and everything else about my system is up to date.

[Loxer]

Hey @Aquaschaf, welcome to the Community.

Hope you are doing great!

That's not cool! Please try to disable Hardware Acceleration. You can find it in the Menu Bar inside the View tab. To access the Menu bar simply click on the 3 dots for Spotify from the Windows Store or hold the ALT key on your keyboard until the Menu shows up for the EXE version.

Let me know how it goes 🙂

[Aquaschaf]

Hey, I already tried disabling HW acceleration - it doesn't have a noticeable impact on performance.

What I did figure out: I am using Spotify at a screen resolution of 3840x2160. Switching to a lower resolution (1920x1080) improves performance significantly, although it is still not perfectly smooth, and the high CPU load still exists. Putting the app in windowed mode, only covering 1/4 of the screen has the same effect.

Since I don't experience any other issues with my system, I suspect that the current version of Spotify does have performance issues in rendering its UI at high resolutions. At a resolution of 1920x1080 it probably is barely noticeable to most users, but at 4K or higher the lag should start to show.