Spotify Desktop Client is extremely laggy

[no_username1]

Hello everyone,

The windows 10 spotify client. I've been using it for several months now, on both free and premium plans, and the app consistantly sucks. Scrolling is laggy, typed letters take a second or so to show on screen, resizing takes forever. It feels like every single task you want to accomplish is painful and laggy. I just discovered the spotify web player right now and realised that it's silky smooth. So how the **bleep** does a desktop app, where you would expect desktop performance, runs so much worse than a web version? Is there any fix for the performance of the desktop app?

Also my computer is a surface pro 2.

[Loxer]

Hey @no_username1, Welcome to the Community.
Hope you are doing great!

I know it sounds simple, but it's often overlooked. Could you try restarting your device? If that doesn't help, try a quick clean reinstall of the app. Just follow these steps.

Try to disable Hardware Acceleration, just click on the … top left corner, inside the View tab find Hardware Acceleration and next click on it to disable then confirm to restart Spotify.
Also, if you don't use local files try to disable them inside Settings.

If you're still having trouble, could you let me know the exact version of Spotify and the exact version of the operating system you're running?

I'll see what I can suggest next!

[no_username1]

Spotify version: 1.0.98.78.gb45d2a6b (Windows Store version)

Windows version: Windows 10 Pro, Version 1803

I followed all the steps you gave and it didn't fix the issue.

[k_67i1vkn-nm]

DEFINITELY MAKE SURE HARDWARE ACCELERATION IS OFF

I have an amd 2700x and an RTX 2080 and hardware acceleration was making the spotify app laggy it may be a little tough to find at first as its under advanced settings under Compatability. it is the only option under compatability

[Loxer]

Hey @no_username1,

Could you try that on another user account on your PC to see if that helps?

Does this happen if you sign in with another Spotify account?

Let me know how that goes 🙂

[Mousky]

Enough with the "restarting your device" and "clean reinstall" suggestions.  Desktop streaming clients have been around for over a decade, yet the Spotify desktop client is junk. When the web player operates better than a desktop client, you are doing something wrong.  You still can't relocate the Spotify cache (not the directory where songs are downloaded) to a different drive or directory. They just don't give two hoots about the desktop client.