Question / Help Annoying points of lag during video stream? Help! :-(

I've been streaming on YouTube, mostly with just audio and static images, very little video, for quite some time, but have now migrated to full video. I previously had encoding overload issues within OBS and some lagging and after making a series of tweaks and changes to my OBS settings, a lot of those issues were fixed... but I noticed today several points (every few minutes) where the video lags and freezes up. Audio is fine, it's only the video that's affected. t usually resolves within a couple of minutes, but happened several times during my stream. I've timestamped a few points from that video here for you to see:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EG_CHKMGbAw (skip to 6:28, also 37:01, 54:34, 1:10:25 as a few examples of this)

FWIW, the lag is reflected in the recorded video as well on my hard drive, not just the YouTube stream. Is it a case of me needing to lower the bitrate from 3000 to 2500 and see what happens, or are there other potential fixes/tweaks for this? It's driving me batty.

For reference, here is my last log file from earlier: https://obsproject.com/logs/oznbUyxjnMZNZ063
 
All of your frame loss is due to rendering lag. There's several things to do here.

- Update windows. You're 2 years out of date, and the april 2019 update adds specific functionality OBS needs for this
- Update OBS. Current version is 25.0.8.
- Run OBS as administrator. This will put OBS on the GPU priority list to allow it avoid the rendering lag you are experiencing.

Additionally, you're running superfast x264 encoding... there should be no need for this as you're running OBS on your GPU, and it should have nvenc available. Switch to Nvenc (new) for the encoder, and disable psychovisual tuning.
 
Thank you! Will try these. One question - when I switch from x264 to NVENC, it drops the bitrate from 3000 to 2500. Should I leave it that way? Also, the Preset is set to "Quality" under NVENC... also, leave that as is?
 
2500 is just the default value it always starts with. You can change this back to 3000.

For the quality option, just leave that as "Quality". The biggest thing is to not choose "Max Quality", as this will force CUDA processing from 2-pass being enabled when Max Quality is used.
 
Just following up on this. After updating Windows 10 and OBS Studio and making some of the settings tweaks you suggested, including the encoder change, things have improved (although I did start getting those occasional encoding overload messages in OBS which I was not getting before, but it didn't seem to cause lag or anything that I noticed). However, last night while streaming, I noticed something distressing where 2-3 times at different points during the stream, the audio and video would suddenly be out of sync, and this would last for several minutes at a time, then it would resolve. See video link below for one example of this around the 25:50 mark:

Stream link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpnXGB2-g0g

Log file is here: https://obsproject.com/logs/8Jm3W-WHuoS-eJow

Any idea why this would happen, or other settings changes I should make?
 
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