Browser Source VERY slow and CPU heavy

R

reflekshun

New Member
Hi there,

Does anyone notice that browser sources with any animated material (say widgets from streamlabs or streamelements) are extremely slow framerate and eating up a lot of CPU?

I'm running an imac pro so things should run fine for say a single animated browser source even if it's complex. But it's running at very slow frames per second and eats up 50-60% of a CPU core.

For comparison, when I run the same browser source on Chrome on the same system, it's 100% smooth as silk and barely uses any of my CPU. So this leads me to believe the browser source engine on OBS for mac is extremely inefficient for some reason. If there's anything I can do for testing or help on this, I'm glad to try and help! I'm not just trying to insult OBS for mac, I actually just want to shine a light on something that is seriously hindering to the streaming experience with browser sources (can't use a lot of streamelements overlays because they have buggy behavior, heavy CPU usage, and really low framerates for animated material).

Browser sources are extremely important for twitch streamers so i'd like to help mac users have a better experience if possible. If anyone has any ideas on why this might be i'm all ears!
 
Altod

Altod

New Member
Hi, I wrote it some time ago in my post, but without ever a reply. I really don't understand how they can't solve this problem.

OBS browser source really slow and freeze on start

Hello, im streaming from my iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2020) 3,6 GHz Intel Core i9 10 core 40 GB 2133 MHz DDR4 AMD Radeon Pro 5700 8 GB O.S. Catalina 10.15.7 - OBS 26.0.1 When I test follow widgets (alert box from Streamlabs) it always freezing on start (2-3 initial seconds), so I haven't a...
obsproject.com obsproject.com
 
R

reflekshun

New Member
dgatwood said:
Have you tried using an actual full-screen browser window with window capture? Does that work any better?
Click to expand...
Yep, did try that. There's a different set of pros and cons to doing it this way:

Pros:
- Chrome runs these overlays MUCH smoother than OBS (better frame rate)
- Less CPU and RAM usage for rendering each overlay in Chrome, than in OBS

Cons:
- Screen Capture uses a fair amount of CPU
- Transparencies etc don't work well with this method
- Have to keep browser windows open and untouched during streams (and all the other problems / inconveniences with come with that)
 
itrends

itrends

New Member
Coming here to say the same. While I am very happy we can now launch OBS without crashing :) Unfortunately browser sources are unusable and dramatically kill the performance of OBS.

This is regardless of it hardware acceleration is enabled disabled, if you are high or low resolution, if you are using complex or simple browser sources. If you use any kind of movement/css animation within the source then it's very evident that there is slowdown.

Similarly, there can be times where even loading the source to start with can take up to 30 seconds. This compounds the more sources you add.

A HORRIBLE workaround for now is to open a regular browser window somewhere else and then do a window capture of what you need and add that in the scene instead. But it is far from sustainable.

Is anyone aware of any known issues that may relate to this slow down or do we need to do some work to get one raise?

What might I do to help support getting this issue resolved as right now it appears to be the final thing to rectify to get OBS effectively usable on M1 Macs :)
 
T

tombacon

New Member
I was having this problem this week, and I fixed it by specifying a custom frame rate in the source settings. By specifying a custom frame rate of 30, all my extremely juddery browser sources suddenly started running buttery smooth.
 
K

kozhco

New Member
You should try to change the scale filtering method.
Right click on the browser source and chose Scale Filtering > Point
 
tosin789

tosin789

Member
reflekshun said:
Hi there,

Does anyone notice that browser sources with any animated material (say widgets from streamlabs or streamelements) are extremely slow framerate and eating up a lot of CPU?

I'm running an imac pro so things should run fine for say a single animated browser source even if it's complex. But it's running at very slow frames per second and eats up 50-60% of a CPU core.

For comparison, when I run the same browser source on Chrome on the same system, it's 100% smooth as silk and barely uses any of my CPU. So this leads me to believe the browser source engine on OBS for mac is extremely inefficient for some reason. If there's anything I can do for testing or help on this, I'm glad to try and help! I'm not just trying to insult OBS for mac, I actually just want to shine a light on something that is seriously hindering to the streaming experience with browser sources (can't use a lot of streamelements overlays because they have buggy behavior, heavy CPU usage, and really low framerates for animated material).

Browser sources are extremely important for twitch streamers so i'd like to help mac users have a better experience if possible. If anyone has any ideas on why this might be i'm all ears!
Click to expand...
This is also happening on Windows, please is there any solution?
 
npcKitsunya

npcKitsunya

New Member
having the same issue. idk why my streamelements plugins are taking up so much CPU. i've them set to "shutdown source when not visible" but for w/e reason it seems every instance of the streamelement overlay/chat widget in every scene is running at once??
confirmed this by creating a new scene and added 4 browser sources from strreamelements. watched that 4 get added to my total # of processes running under Streamlabs on Task Manager. Deleted the new scene, and the # of processes immediately dropped by 4.
 
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