If you find that your Stream Deck is lagging all of a sudden and each button press takes a few seconds to register, you’re not alone; this has been a common issue for quite a while now. In most cases, it is caused by having many high-bandwidth USB devices plugged into ports handled by a single USB controller on your motherboard, and it is commonly encountered when using software such as Razer Synapse or SignalRGB.
Stream Deck Lagging – A Quick Fix
There are a few ways to go about fixing this issue, but in the end the fix really boils down to switching your Stream Deck to another USB port on your motherboard (albeit not a random one) and/or disabling conflicting software. Here are the details:
- Before you do anything else, it’s always worth to update the Elgato Stream Deck firmware. After you do that, you can proceed to the next point.
- Try using different, non-adjacent USB ports for your Stream Deck and any other high-bandwidth USB devices connected to your computer. If you have devices like software-controlled RGB keyboards or USB hubs plugged into your system, connect your Stream Deck to a USB port managed by a different USB controller than those devices. You may need to experiment with a few different ports to find the combination that resolves the lag.
- If your Stream Deck is connected to a USB hub, make sure that the hub is properly powered, and it doesn’t have any other high-bandwidth USB devices connected to it (see above). If the lag still persists, try plugging the Stream Deck directly into your computer.
- If you have the Razer Synapse software installed on your system, there is a chance that when more complex animated light effects are running on your Razer USB peripherals, the Stream Deck might start to lag. For a temporary fix, switch to static keyboard backlight or shut down the Razer Synapse app completely to stop that from happening. For a permanent fix in many cases you can simply switch the Stream Deck to another USB port on your computer handled by another USB controller, as described in the second point above. This has fixed the issue in my case.
If you’re using a desktop PC, the front and back panel USB ports are often controlled by separate USB controllers. This means that plugging your Stream Deck into a front panel port—especially if no other high-bandwidth USB devices are connected there—can eliminate the lag completely.
If all of the above didn’t help, the issue is most probably caused by another piece of software conflicting with the Elgato Stream Deck app. The most likely culprits are programs that constantly run in the background and make use of USB peripherals such as the aforementioned Razer Synapse or SignalRGB.
Unfortunately, in some cases when your Stream Deck is connected to a USB controller that’s already overloaded with other high-bandwidth USB devices and you cannot change that—for example because you don’t have any other free USB ports left on your computer—this issue may not be easily fixable. In such situations, you may need to uninstall the problematic apps or find a way to reduce their USB data usage. That’s about all you can do in this scenario.