What Are the Steps on How to Turn Off Discord Overlay Without Breaking Games?

[jamerober]

I’m looking for clear steps on how to turn off discord overlay because it keeps interfering with certain games. Does disabling it affect performance, voice chat, or notifications in any way?

 

[Ragnar Lothbrok]

It is extremely easy to turn off and does not have any impact on your voice chat or my audio quality. All you have to do is to open Discord, click the gear in the lower right-hand corner and go to Activity Settings scrolling down to Game Overlay and turn it off. Your friends will sound exactly the same; you will just not see their avatars on your screen. This is merely a visual change that takes advantage of some of the GPU resources.

 

[ArthurMex]

Finally! There is another one who despises that thing. It is as though Discord had attempted to revive the wheel but had made it square. My own was switched off several months ago as it continued to prevent my mini-map in League. Best decision ever.

 

[Eric]

In fact, the performance improvement is actual with respect to mid-range rigs. The overlay is a browser window, which is overlaid on your game engine and is transparent. In high-performance games, the high frame rates of star citizen or cyberpunk, it can be disabled and make your frame rates stable and eliminate those micro-stutters. Assuming that you have a black screen crashes, then this is the first thing that any tech support board will advise you to kill.

 

[megamind]

Wait, you need not switch it off with everything. In fact, you can turn the overlay off or on per game by going to settings to Registered Games. I leave it on when I play casual MMOs to be able to see who is speaking but I obviously disable it when I play Valorant because it interferes with the raw mouse input.

 

[captainghost]

Does it fix the "Alt-Tab" lag? When I am attempting to tab out with the overlay on, my PC goes into a heart attack three times. I hope that the process of killing the overlay prevents windows having to cope with two separate full-screen hooks simultaneously.

 

[jimmy]

In case you continue to receive the pop-up of overlay despite the fact that you have turned it off, then you should look at whether the Legacy Overlay is also turned on in the same list. There are instances when a Discord update will switch a new version on accidentally, and your old settings are still on off. It is an utter mess but switching off the two toggles normally solves it.

 

[TaylorTravels]

LOL, I like how we all agreed as one unit that the convenience of receiving a notification is not such a big cost to pay 10 FPS. Just like a civilized individual, use a second monitor to use Discord. Problem solved.

 

[HeatherMun]

Something to be aware of: in case you place a chat window on the overlay to be able to read Twitch chat or DMs and play at the same time, you will lose the functionality. You will even need to tab out to answer somebody. To me, it is a small price to pay to have my game lock up whenever somebody sends me a GM in a server that I did not turn the sound off.

 

[AnnisHayma]

Also, ensure that you restart your game once you have changed the setting. Other games hook the Discord API when they start and even when you disable the setting during the game, there is still a chance that the background process is still sitting there consuming your RAM until you perform a new launch.

 

[Evelinawright]

I also observed that its disabling also resolved a problem where the cursor of my mouse just vanished occasionally on the menus. The overlay apparently was attempting to steal the attention of the mouse in an inappropriate moment. In case your game is floaty or unresponsive, it is almost a necessity to turn off the overlay.