Testing whether Discord's process priorities hurt esports performance

Some users have claimed Discord's default process priorities can take up CPU time and reduce frame rates in competitive shooters. The complaint is that one or more Discord processes run above Normal priority, causing spikes in frame times in games like CS2 and Valorant.

Process priority tells Windows how much CPU time to give a program. Normal is the default, while Above Normal, High and Realtime push a program ahead of others. The Windows Discord app runs eight processes: five at Normal, one at Above Normal, and two labeled DiscordSystemHelper at High.

To check this I ran Counter-Strike 2 at 1080p with Low graphics, FSR Performance upscaling, and Nvidia Reflex enabled on a Ryzen 9 9900X rig with an RTX 5090. I compared three bot matches—no Discord, Discord with default priorities, and Discord with every process forced to Normal—and the frame-time graphs and fps figures were almost identical; frame times were only a millisecond or so higher with Discord running.

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