Michael Berry
New Member
I'm using OBS right now due to COVID-19, not to stream, but to be just a video/audio mixer for several C920 webcams to feed into zoom/skype. In my setup prep last week I was testing and was finding that sometimes my rendering times would spike a little (like up to 8 or 9 ms from around 2-3ms). I'm trying to keep latency to a minimum so I did some reading and found that it is caused by GPU overload.
I'm running an older Dell desktop (Optiplex 990, Win10 Pro, 8GB i5, OBS 25.0.1, using what I have available right now cuz its hard to buy things) and was using the integrated video on the PC. So I went to Best Buy and bought a Radeon RX5500XT card and put it in there. Surprisingly the rendering lag and dropped frames due to rendering lag got a lot WORSE (14ms+). I used the GPUZ tool and it looked as if the video card was barely coming off of idle.
I did a similar test on my dell laptop that has an Nvidia GeForce 940MX card in it. Same results, the integrated graphics performed way better than switching OBS over to use the dedicated graphics card. Same thing, the GPU was not working very hard at all, not ever exceeding around 40%. It seems like there is a "traffic jam" of sorts with the rendering frames. When there is a lot of movement on screen to process it backs up and the rendering time spikes way up and it seems to stay there for several seconds until the movement on the OBS preview stops and it "clears" out the queue of backlogged frames.
So, I returned the card to BestBuy and we're getting along with the integrated graphics on the Optiplex Desktop PC. So, I'm wondering, if I were to buy a new PC or a video card for my use case with OBS, what should I buy? Is there some other bottleneck between the CPU and GPU that could be causing these frames to get backed up? I've read the posts on the rendering lag but I've never seen my GPU get close to maxed out so I'm trying to figure out what could be another cause of rendering lag.
Any help would be appreciated :)
I'm running an older Dell desktop (Optiplex 990, Win10 Pro, 8GB i5, OBS 25.0.1, using what I have available right now cuz its hard to buy things) and was using the integrated video on the PC. So I went to Best Buy and bought a Radeon RX5500XT card and put it in there. Surprisingly the rendering lag and dropped frames due to rendering lag got a lot WORSE (14ms+). I used the GPUZ tool and it looked as if the video card was barely coming off of idle.
I did a similar test on my dell laptop that has an Nvidia GeForce 940MX card in it. Same results, the integrated graphics performed way better than switching OBS over to use the dedicated graphics card. Same thing, the GPU was not working very hard at all, not ever exceeding around 40%. It seems like there is a "traffic jam" of sorts with the rendering frames. When there is a lot of movement on screen to process it backs up and the rendering time spikes way up and it seems to stay there for several seconds until the movement on the OBS preview stops and it "clears" out the queue of backlogged frames.
So, I returned the card to BestBuy and we're getting along with the integrated graphics on the Optiplex Desktop PC. So, I'm wondering, if I were to buy a new PC or a video card for my use case with OBS, what should I buy? Is there some other bottleneck between the CPU and GPU that could be causing these frames to get backed up? I've read the posts on the rendering lag but I've never seen my GPU get close to maxed out so I'm trying to figure out what could be another cause of rendering lag.
Any help would be appreciated :)