Roblox Studio very slow performance when window in focus

  • The problem persists after restarting (and forcing all windows updates)
  • I updated to the latest Nvidia drivers yesterday to no avail. The restart was performed after this
  • I’ve tried running with more or less no other programs running (including background processes) to no avail
  • I don’t have any DirectX debugging enabled

I did watch task manager just now whilst testing again and it almost looks like Roblox is explicitly throttling my PC performance. When in focus the CPU usage is between 0.1% and 0.4%, with the GPU between 1% and 1.8%. When not in focus CPU usage is between 0.6% and 3.7%, with GPU usage between 1.9% and 9.6% (both depending on mouse movement over the window).

I should also mention that I have reinstalled Roblox Studio and that I have a strange monitor setup (though this wasn’t an issue before) with two running at 144Hz, one at 60Hz and technically a TV turned off that I believe runs at 60Hz (if any of this helps).

Studio as a whole, really, just runs horribly now. Sometime in the past few weeks one of the updates severely hindered studio’s overall performance. There’s games of mine that now might sit for over an hour trying to load into studio, whereas before they would load within 5-10 minutes which was reasonable enough. Usually after an hour I’ve wasted my whole night and cancel the program via task manager. In the unlikely event I succeed in loading them, the in-studio performance remains very low. I think the program is just dying completely.

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I should mention that this does feel very much like some kind of deliberate background throttling being applied but in reverse (when in focus instead of when in the background). Could understand if this was flipped

It would be helpful if you have additional information about which parts are slow. Perhaps adding a microprofile will give us enough information to action this.

And you are not seeing this issue when just running the Roblox Client/Player to play experiences, right?

Correct. I don’t have any performance issues when playing a game normally at all (including the same game). The performance issues are the same when trying to play in-studio

Some extra context from some further testing. I get somewhat better (but definitely not good) performance when switching to OpenGL or Vulkan (they seem about the same). Still very choppy for both though. Up till now Direct3D11 was manually set instead of automatic (for all previous tests)

Hmm, could you grab a micro profiler capture for Vulkan?

I’m somewhat surprised the client doesn’t have the issue as it runs the exact same rendering engine code.

Yeah, this is why I was curious if it was some kind of optimisation thing for studio that’s gone haywire.

Same kind of test again. The first half is with studio in the background (whilst mousing over) and the second is with it in focus (mousing over).

microprofile-20230704-221040.html (5.2 MB)

This is puzzling. Both graphics APIs have the same behavior, but that behavior is that the graphics driver part just takes long… which is odd. We literally just call into the graphics API.

I’m somewhat stumped, so I reached out to the studio team to see if they have made any changes to throttling.

Are there any immediate things I could try? (e.g. wiping all user data locally and all hidden settings somehow)

I did try resetting all studio settings to default earlier, as well as disabling all beta features; neither of which made any difference.

I should also note that I haven’t been actively using Roblox Studio since April 21st of last year (as far as I can tell from looking at version history on my places) so this issue could have started a while back. I’ve only just in the past few days come back on to try working on some stuff. I previously didn’t have this issue. I also don’t have this issue on my laptop seemingly.

Ok, this was very much not the case previously (including yesterday I’m sure), but I am now having the exact same performance issues in games too. The following microprofile was performed the same way as previously.

microprofile-20230706-000513.html (8.0 MB)

Not having these performance issues when playing through the roblox microsoft store app. I do seem to be occasionally having chuggy performance (that feels similar) when navigating pages on there, but this is probably unrelated though

I have this same issue too.

A potential temporary fix I found was to keep a selection box of any sixe by holding down the left button and dragging your mouse a bit and then keeping the left mouse button held down.

I think it might have to do something with some viewport selection things.

Does disabling the new Studio outlines improve performance for you? You could try setting to “Bounding Boxes” as mentioned here Selection Improvements - #272 by kirazeee325

That it happens in game is interesting. I can add some extra profiling markers to hopefully further narrow down exactly where it is slow. This would come out with a release in 1.5 weeks though :sad:

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I have a notable update; I decided to try completely uninstalling roblox and this time wiping all of my local appdata (in %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Roblox). This seems to have completely solved the issue. I understand that you guys are likely still wanting to diagnose whatever this is for a future update however, so I did back up the entire folder elsewhere first so it can either be restored or sent over for diagnosis.

Do you have anywhere secure I could send it to, or any other way that I could assist?

TL;DR for anyone else facing this exact issue and looking for a quick solution, delete your local roblox data after uninstalling (prior to reinstalling).

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Apologies, I feel like I’m going back and forth so much with this issue. I’ve managed to repro the issue by changing my tab/section layout within roblox studio. The cause seems to be directly linked to me grouping the “toolbox” section with other sections and having the toolbox (now as a tab) hidden (the other tab in view). Closing the toolbox section entirely also fixes the issue.

Interestingly this doesn’t seem to have an impact in Roblox Player at all; so the issue I was having with that may yet have been caused by something else in my old/wiped roblox install (again, I do still have access to this if required)

TL;DR: The toolbox window has issues when it’s combined to make a tab (and not currently in view)

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This is great information, thank you for posting not only the issue, but also the things that seem to work for you, so that other people can try. Really appreciated!

Unfortunately, I cannot run a microprofiler as the main issue is during the initial loading of a Studio instance.

What I can explain a bit though, is that Studio can sometimes take a long time, 20-45 minutes, to load a place. Usually these are larger places, and nothing else is happening on my PC at the time. I will say though, since making this comment, things have gotten a bit faster, so my initial concern there is lesser. However one major issue I still consistently have is the failure of Roblox (both studio and game client, but mostly studio) to load all of the unions in a place. Typically this happens on Studio; the place loads, taking some time, and for whatever reason some of the unions (or even most of them) will never load. You will get to the point where you can work in Studio as normal, however many of the unions are invisible. They are not corrupt, because the next time you open that same place in Studio or in a game client, they might load just fine. It’s sporadic.

I hope this helps to some degree, it’s a long standing issue and I’d love to see it fixed.

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