Question / Help 30fps has significantly more stutter than 60fps. It's confusing

[SirCrest]

Hello there folks...

Incase you have an idea already of what is going on, let me be clear I'm not talking about fluidity or anything like that. I've been a videographer and a video editor for years and I know the terminology thrown around, this is something else. 30fps for me feels like it's maybe 15 at times, where as 60fps feels... so much nicer. It's somehow easier for my system. I posted a sample video to explain what I'm talking about.

I suppose in some odd way it kind of makes sense. if you drop a frame at 60fps it's only 16.666ms, versus 33ms with 30fps. However according to my logs I'm not dropping frames, atleast during the encoding pass. Obviously I'm just interpreting what I read.

In this video I recorded 30fps straight, and then 60fps, and then I took the 60fps file and removed every other frame to make it 30fps, and even then it's still much smoother. Not perfect but still much better. The thing is I don't want to always have to stream 60fps.

This was done with local recording only, game capture, 1920x1080 scaled to 720p, x264 UltraFast 15mbps. I also tried quicksync as well but it doesn't seem to be a encoding performance thing.

Inside of GRID I'm literally getting over 200-230fps as I played during that sample video. I feel nothing when it's recording. I attached the latest log I just did a few minutes ago for a fresh test. If desired I can post the video file itself from that session.

I am indeed using SLI, however I tried it with SLI disabled with both cards independant and I saw no difference. I tried it with two screens, no difference. Single screen, no difference. I tried 337.50, 335.23, 334.89, 332.21, and the last 331 Gameready driver. It's not just in GRID, it's simply that I feel no difference in GRID and I can boot it up quickly to test things. I've tried FarCry 3, BF3, BF4, Torchlight, SimCity, and Dirt 3. Even Papers, Please feels stuttery. I streamed that a few weeks ago and that was the first time I noticed the stutter. This was something that suddenly happened. I had streamed beautifully weeks before.

I'm all ears for suggestions, I've searched for the last week or so and tried so many different settings and wiped my entire system of OBS including all appdata for a fresh install. I waited until I exhausted all other options before asking here. I'm up for being educated, and willing to try almost anything at this point. OBS has been great up until the last few weeks.

 

[paibox]

I've seen this happen myself a few times, but I'm unfortunately not sure what causes it. In the encoded video, the same frame will sometimes be displayed for 2-4 frames at certain intervals, and because it does this for the same number of frames at 30 fps, it looks even less smooth than 60.

It seems to be some sort of frame timing issue, but I'm unfortunately in the dark as to how I would go about investigating what's causing it. With a lot of progress already having been made on the rewrite of OBS, and Jim (the main developer) being busy with that, there is unfortunately the risk that this will go unfixed for the current incarnation of OBS, but if it still happens in obs-studio I will try my best to figure out why it happens.

 

[SirCrest]

Thanks for the reply. This has been really frustrating because I invested in new side monitors and rearranged my room to start on a new personal goal of streaming at least every other day. Things were great for a while and then this randomly pops up : \

Any other information I can provide to help any investigations? Any specific patterns on your end? If this is something that you've seen and not sure about it, then I suppose I should... not worry and stick to 60fps? I'll have to stick to quicksync or lighter games. And I assume the rewrite is still far from being in a public form, correct?

Thanks again for the post.

 

[paibox]

Yeah, basically just stick to 60 fps. It's not even nearly as noticeable there, especially not with modern games where most of the animations are done at 24-30 frames per second anyway.

The rewrite may not be all that far off from a public test release, hardware accelerated window capture is already in, so you would be able to test using that at least. (But then SLI would be disabled or something? I forget if that was an issue with windowed mode or not.)

 

[j0hanSE]

how much more demanding for the CPU is 60 than 45? Currently having set to 45 for my i5-3570k.

 

[SirCrest]

I don't really know. My 3770k is barely pegged when gaming and streaming most times it seems. Even 720p60 in GRID maybe uses 20% CPU with the game also running. I would probably never stream at inbetween framerates, just not in my nature.

Also doing a bump to say that the latest 0.621b seems to perform around the same. I know there was no indication it would fix, but just mentioning it. Even 60fps doesn't feel nearly as smooth as I wish it was. I did look around in this area and it seems a few people have been having similar problems, atleast in theory.

 

[Bensam123]

Could this be related to the capture method? Have you tried window capture and perhaps something like DXtory for comparison? This may be completely off, but does the downscale filter influence this? It almost looks like the left window has occasional and sporadic stutter, where as the right one does not.

Have you tried changing the refresh rate of your monitor? What is the refresh rate of your monitor? If there is some interpretation with refresh cycles, it could be OBS is missing a refresh cycle. I don't know if this even matters or the method OBS uses takes refreshes into account.

I'm highly interested in this, as this is a perception issue and people can notice this.

 

[SirCrest]

This is all on gamecapture so far, I tried window capture but it doesn't see the games as possible hook targets. I use Fraps and Dxtory for capturing video for all the content on both my YT channels. Both capture the games I've tried beautifully with great results. Though I also have the option of syncronizing the render framerates with those programs. Like Vsync but synced to the video file recording. I tried each filter option with no influence and also tried with no downscale at all.

My monitor is running at 60hz, and that's the only option it can physically do. It's an HP ZR30w, a very non-flexible monitor. Like I said before, I streamed PERFECTLY a month or so ago. I thought it might be drivers so I wiped them and went back to every driver since November to try and they all seem to have no impact.

I also tried with all monitors on, and then only a single monitor. i tried with the preview disabled in OBS, and with the preview on.

And you are correct with your perception of the stutter, that is exactly what is happening. Like with what paibox had said, if the issue is a certain frame being displayed for 2-4 output frames that would mean in the 60fps format when converted to 30, it would be only 1-2 frames of stutter. Which is why it looks smoother, even though 60fps is not anywhere near as smooth as other people's 60fps. Even for games like Papers please which is like a DOS game, it's stuttery.

 

[Bensam123]

If you can't use window capture, use monitor capture... it's pretty much the same thing. You'll have to run it in window though.

Ah... I didn't see that you could stream properly a month ago.

 

[SirCrest]

Yea, i suppose that's an option, though a bit inconvienent. I'd like to find the problem and maybe roll something back if I could.

And I suppose the post I had was a bit cryptic about when I last streamed well. I tried to include all relevant information. I really did think it was the video drivers but even rolling back to ones from months ago which I might have been using seemed to do nothing. I actually have my old streams recorded and they are at 30 and 60fps and they look so smooth in comparison. It's a shame.

I appreciate the possible solutions.