If you are seeing visual glitches when connecting to a computer, here are some possible reasons or things you could do to fix it.
Low quality settings or hardware or connection issues
Note that if your stream is low quality and has compression artifacts (similar to the rightmost image shown below, or what you would see in other videos online, like YouTube at lower quality settings), then it not a glitch but actually a sign that you may want to change some quality settings or find out if your hardware or connection is having issues.
Unsupported hosts falling back to software encoder
If you see red icon in the Parsec stream at the top-left, which says ‘The host is using software encoding’ and you’re observing a glitchy screen (usually mostly green) in this state, then it means the host's hardware is too old for Parsec, or something is causing Parsec to not use fast hardware encoding. Learn more.
Issues with Vulkan renderer on Android
If you went into your Parsec settings and changed the Renderer setting to the experimental Vulkan renderer, there is a known issue where the screen will become a garbled mess if the resolution of the stream is changed. Switch back to the OpenGL renderer to prevent this from happening. A restart of the app is required to apply the setting.
Host display is unavailable or a game is fullscreen
If you are seeing a frozen picture of the Parsec stream, it’s possible the host display is sleeping or not connected, and Parsec doesn’t have any display available to be able to capture new frames. There are also some cases where games in fullscreen may not be captured properly, and it’ll be necessary to set the game to windowed mode or borderless windowed.
High refresh rate displays
Some high refresh rate displays may contain blinking or flickering. It’s possible your display uses Display Stream Compression, for which there are no known solutions that work all of the time. Some displays may just need to turn off their G-Sync / FreeSync / Variable Refresh Rate settings in NVIDIA or AMD control panels, or Windows settings.
Graphics driver isn’t working correctly
Older drivers may not work correctly, but it’s also possible you have the latest driver, and it is misbehaving in some way. For Windows, follow the guide for updating and cleaning up graphics drivers. This is recommended on both the host and client computer.
Altering Parsec settings related to video
If none of the above is helping with your issue, you may want to try altering some settings that affect the video stream on Parsec, which may alter the behavior you’re seeing. The following settings can be changed:
- Renderer: There are different graphics APIs used to render the Parsec app, that can be selected depending on your operating system. Some are experimental and may not work perfectly. Make sure to scroll to the top and click Restart after changing this setting to apply changes
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Decoder: If the issue is related to your hardware, then Software may work better.
- Keep in mind other settings like H.265, 4:4:4 (in-stream overlay, paid), 10-bit color, may override your decoder choice. You can always connect to the host and click the Parsec icon to see what decoder is actually being used, at the top-right
- H.265: In some rare cases this setting may cause issues when on or off
- 10-bit color: This setting is experimental, so it may be best to turn it off and see if you observe any difference
- Prefer 4:4:4 Color (in-stream overlay, paid feature): This setting does not usually cause visual issues (if anything, it’s meant to improve the colors), but it could theoretically so it’s worth testing with it off, in case you enabled it
- VSync: When off, you may notice screen tearing, and the stream may generally just feel worse. Make sure to scroll to the top and click Restart after changing this setting to apply changes