VLC - framerate, need help

I bought a new PC, specifically for playing videos in up to 4k in my living room. The PC has a quiet cooling, fast enough processor for the video playback and a GPU with a HDMI 2.0 port and a high speed cable for a sufficient connection speed to my 4k TV.

I can not figure out how to play videos in full framerate though. As an example even 1080p videos play in a considerably lower framerate, I noticed this in a Hitman 2 video some time ago, more recently in the Titanfall Breaking Brad ones. But the issue only occurs in fullscreen - when the video runs in a window, maximalised so there are still boarders visible, the video itself is perfect. Once I switch to fullscreen, the framerate goes down. It’s watcheble, but very noticable. Same thing actually happens in youtube videos, the issue seems less prenounced in Firefox than in Chrome, the best workaround for this is to use the app in the TV which works great, obviously. So my main issue at the moment is premium GB videos.

I can post my PC specs if needed, I run the latest drivers and everything. I tried to install the K-lite codec pack, but that didn’t solve anything and I don’t really knwo what elese I could try. I am not advanced enough user to know which setting in the GPU control panel I should tweak.

Any suggestion would be appriciated!

VLC uses it's own internal codecs, so K-lite is not needed.

Anyways, I would try the VLC settings menu. Tools > Preferences. In there check Video and Input / Codecs. In the latter one try DXVA.
I would otherwise recommend trying Media Player Home Classic, if you are on Windows. If on Linux, use mpv.

It would be helpful if you at least post the CPU, OS and GPU specs of your computer.

Yes, I will post the specs, I created this topic from my phone at work. I will try your suggestions for sure!

Check to make sure you're running the latest driver stack. Are you running open-source drivers or proprietary? Do you use a compositor like Compiz? Compiz can cause some performance issues. Compton is generally a better alternative now.

As for VLC, try XCD for output. It may not be the fanciest, but it's a pretty solid fallback.

M specs are:

Win10

AMD Ryzen 3 1300 Quad Core, 3.5GHz

NVIDIA GeForce GT 1030

As said above, I don't believe it is an issue of performance. I have updated the drivers many times to the latest version since I have started trying solving this issue in December, I moved to another city since then, changed jobs twice and had no time to actually solve it and now it is getting on my nerves.

With you mentioning the issue popping up when you fullscreen the videos, I wonder if it's a possible compositing issue. Maybe your compositor isn't properly handing over rendering to whatever APIs you're using (OpenGL, Vulkan, XCB, etc.). Either that or maybe your drivers don't properly handle whatever APIs it's trying to use.

EDIT: Oh, Windows. I have no idea then.

So, it could be virtually 1000 things messing your video playback up. For example other apps using video outputs like games, desktop eye candy plugins like calendars, interactive wallpapers and what not. Dual monitor setups can also be messing with stuff like this in some conditions.

A. I told you about the output settings in VLC, you should try different options there.

B. To further test things I really recommend downloading Media Player Home Classic, which is a very good video player for Windows. Better than VLC in some cases, and it's good to have both.
Grab it here: https://mpc-hc.org/
(It's free and no spyware, adware and other crap that is so common these days.)

When installed, open it and go to View - Options - Output.
At the top under directshow, select Enhanced Video Renderer (custom presenter). And make sure it DXVA now has a green checkmark to it. All options should have but that is the most important, since DXVA is Hardware Accelrated output. Meaning GPU.

Play the video in Media Player Home Classic, It should say Playing (H/W) if DXVA is enabled.

C. If MP-HC doesn't play it in a nice framerate and fullscreen, you could try it's Direct3D output, also in Options - Output. And the alt Vsync option.

As I said, it can be many different things, this is just about ruling out VLC as the player, if something is messing with it. Your GPU should indeed be able to handle these vids, and CPU too even without HW accel I'm guessing.
It's however quite hard to diag your problems like this.

To test your browser, try enabling and disabling Hardware Acceleration, should be in settings in Chrome. See if it makes any difference on/off in fullscreen.

Another thing I'd consider is if you have another GPU - for instance a built-in integrated Intel HD Graphics card - perhaps the stuff is running on the wrong card. That happens with laptops sometimes.