OBS Studio has various to indicate when there is an issue with the stream or recording.
This guide will cover the most common indicators, what they mean and general fixes for them.
By default, OBS Studio will show CPU usage, preview frame rate and dropped frames stats at the bottom of the OBS Studio UI.
More stats can be accessed by openining the stats window. This window can be pinned to the main UI to keep it in place even after restarting OBS Studio.
How to access more detailed stats:
Frames missed due to rendering lag
What does does this mean and what is rendering lag?
Rendering lag occurs when OBS Studio cannot get frames off of the GPU to the video encoder fast enough.
What are the primary causes of rendering lag?
This guide will cover the most common indicators, what they mean and general fixes for them.
By default, OBS Studio will show CPU usage, preview frame rate and dropped frames stats at the bottom of the OBS Studio UI.
More stats can be accessed by openining the stats window. This window can be pinned to the main UI to keep it in place even after restarting OBS Studio.
How to access more detailed stats:
- Click on View in the toolbar
- Click on Stats
- Click on View in the toolbar
- Hover the mouse over Docks
- Select Stats
Dropped frames indicate that video frames which OBS Studio encoded and has sent out over the network do not reach the destination. For example, if you are streaming to Twitch, when dropped frames go up this means Twitch did not receive frames sent by OBS Studio.
The primary reasons for dropped frames are all related to the internet connection between your computer and the server you are sending video to.
- Your personal network connection upload speed is being maxed out
- Your internet service provider is having connection issues on their network
- The streaming platform's ingest server is having issues
- Make sure you're stream bitrate does not exceed 75% of your total upload bandwidth provided by your ISP. You can check your upload speed using many of the free speed test websites available.
- If you live with other people check if they are uploading something. This can saturate the entire upload speed.
- Try a different ingest server - the issue could be the ISP is having routing issues and sending video to a different server will use a different internet route
- Try a different ingest server - The streaming service's ingest server could be having issues or be overloaded
Frames missed due to rendering lag
What does does this mean and what is rendering lag?
Rendering lag occurs when OBS Studio cannot get frames off of the GPU to the video encoder fast enough.
What are the primary causes of rendering lag?
- The GPU in your computer is being maxed out at 100% usage. This can be checked by opening Task Manager and clicking on the GPU tab.
- There are too many video/graphical overlays in scenes
- Playing games and streaming at the same time is very resource intensive and can easily cause the GPU to be used at 100%, especially when playing at higher or unlocked frame rates.
- Use the games built-in frame rate limiter to limit the frame rate so the GPU is not maxed out
- Enable V-sync to reduce GPU usage
- Lower graphical settings to reduce GPU usage
- If you have many graphical sources active such as video file and image overlays, try reducing the amount of overlays
- Run OBS Studio as admin
- Since OBS 25.0 a secret performance enhancing method has been added. When OBS Studio runs as admin, Windows will give GPU priority to OBS Studio over other programs and this can help resolve rendering lag.
- Right click on the OBS Studio launcher and select Run as administrator
- Note: Windows 10 Game mode must be on for the admin trick to work.
