Question / Help Bad performance recording screen while playing game

[Polda18]

Hi. I am using OBS Studio on laptop and managed to get Display Capture working again by running OBS on integrated GPU instead of nVidia. If I record the screen while on desktop with no active 3D app running (like games), the fps are stable at 60 fps. However, when I run Minecraft (while recording), the fps overall drop a little bit down to around 25 fps. That wouldn't hurt me, if the resulting video hadn't much lower fps than what I experienced. Destkop portion was fine, video had stable fps until it got to the game, then fps dropped down to 5-10 fps. Resulting in unwatchable video. Since I want to record gameplay and development tutorials to YouTube (while also being able to edit the videos later to result in decent video quality), and being a lazy guy that doesn't want to quite change the settings frequently based on current needs (yeah, I just want to launch the program, hit the record button and go), this is huge issue for me. Can I somehow improve performance of the recording while being able to record Display Capture device at all times? Minecraft is running on nVidia, made sure to run the Java edition on nVidia, previously it was running on integrated GPU, too. And the results were worse than now. But it is still unbearable to watch, can't let that out to YT.

Also, while speaking of this, can you please advice me bitrate settings to set for recording in case I need to edit the videos and still being able to get high quality of the edited video? That being said, I want final exported video from Shotcut (my choice of video editing software) set to 75% quality MP4 export (H.264 codec, settings ready for YouTube, VFX footages are in 90% quality) to be high quality, so the uncut video should be the highest quality possible (I am not expecting losless quality, that would be too much high to expect to work properly). What video and audio bitrate do you suggest me to minimize losing important details in final cut as much as possible?

My specs are as following:

• Integrated GPU: Intel UHD Graphics 630
• Dedicated GPU: nVidia GeForce GTX 1050
• CPU: Intel Core i5+, 8th gen, quad-core, two threads per core (8-thread CPU)
• 8GB DDR4 RAM + 16GB Intel Optane Memory
• 1TB HDD
• Acer Nitro 5 Gaming Laptop

As seen here:

 

[Narcogen]

There's no way around the need to use the Intel GPU for display capture and the Nvidia GPU for maximum performance. There's no OBS setting that can compensate for the significant performance difference in applications like Minecraft on Intel vs Nvidia, or the bottleneck in trying to copy frames between two GPUs, or the need to run on the same GPU as a captured application to run a Game Capture.

For best quality video for local recording, use simple output mode, indistinguishable quality, large file size. Do not use a static bitrate (CBR) for recording, that is for streaming that requires it.

 

[Polda18]

So I have to use simple output mode then and set it to very high quality? What about codec? What is the default codec that is used? Is it H.264? Will it solve performance issues? Because I am lazy and I don't want to switch between GPUs in order to capture the game. I want to be able to just run the program and hit record to record anything on the screen. Also, can I use NVENC when running on integrated GPU? When I tried that, it reported there's no such function, so I assume this is exclusive to nVidia. Sadly, nVidia is unable to use Display Capture.

 

[Narcogen]

There is no way to avoid the requirement to switch between GPUs when doing display and game/window captures on a laptop with two GPUs. If you want a setup where you don't need to do this, use a desktop.

No, you cannot use NVENC when OBS is running on the Intel GPU.

There is no need to select codec, for nearly all applications you'll be using h.264.