Question / Help 20 FPS loss in game. Normal or bad?

[Cogman7]

Greetings. I'm using OBS to record speed runs of Fallout: New Vegas. I have a GTX 660 and upgraded my processor from an i3-2100 to an i7-2600. I am using Windows 7 with Aero disabled, Game capture, and Window capture for Livesplit.

Recording settings:
2000 bitrate, 30FPS, 1440x900 downscaled by 1.25 (to 720P), CPU preset veryfast. Everything else is normal.

When I'm in game FPS drops from a smooth 60 down to between 37-43 frames. I have tried everything from the FAQ and still have the in-game performance loss. Is this pretty typical even for a Core i7 processor with 8 threads?

I was not aware that using OBS created such a performance hit. I'm wondering if Shadowplay would be the best solution. Any advice for me?

 

[FerretBomb]

Enable Aero. OBS actually runs faster and smoother with it on.
Disabling it is bad information at this point, from when it used to cause a performance hit back in the Vista days.

If you are recording locally only, use the recording settings guide:
https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/how-to-make-high-quality-local-recordings.16/

Follow ALL of the settings in there; it minimizes CPU usage (by using the Ultrafast preset) and results in max possible image quality. Large filesizes, but it's easy to re-encode the video later with better quality compression, when you aren't recording.

 

[Cogman7]

I'm going to give this a shot. Looks promising, thank you!

 

[Cogman7]

Wow, that made ALL the difference! Setting the buffer to 0 and using the ultrafast preset is giving me a smooth 60FPS in game and great recording quality. Huge thank you man, really helps!

 

[FerretBomb]

Glad to hear it!
If you plan to keep the video files long-term, you can use Handbrake or ffmpeg to re-encode them with a very slow/high-quality compression rate to cut down the filesize. :) Cheers!