Cannot Consistently Record Smooth Videos

S

Shadefyre

New Member
Hey folks, I'm getting a little desperate because I have been trying out all kinds of settings and trying all kinds of fixes for months now without getting any tangible results. Basically, what I want to do is record smooth gameplay in 1080p at 60fps. Preferably with a constant 50 Mbps bitrate, but I'm not married to CBR. It's just what I was recording/rendering before I took a break from making videos.

However, when I tried to start making videos again back in October, I found that recording with Shadowplay like I had previously done was giving me choppy video that did not match how the games were running when capturing. Now, at the time I still had a venerable old GTX 1080, but the things I was trying to record weren't even pushing 50% GPU/CPU utilization. So after Shadowplay was a bust, I decided to finally give OBS a try and see if I could find the right set of options to get nice, smooth video at a decent quality. And I could not. The problem was pretty much always the same no matter what combination of settings I tried: videos that were choppy with little stutters and framerate drops even though the logs don't mention any dropped or skipped frames.

Now I've got a 5070TI, am capturing onto an NVME SSD, and still get the exact same choppiness as I had before the upgrades, despite using even less of my total GPU power than before. Also, I seem to get the same level of choppiness regardless of whether I'm using the fastest or slowest preset (as in it does not increase or decrease like you would expect), which is baffling. I should also mention that almost all of my tests have been using NVENC H.264/HEVC encoders, because it doesn't make sense to me that those shouldn't be the best option for my setup.

I really need some ideas for why all my NVENC based attempts to capture have run into this problem, and what might be interferring with the capture. Included here is a log where the issue is very much present in the captured video. https://obsproject.com/logs/EHwEcrkDe6Kyw3eD Any help you can offer would be very greatly appreciated.
 
The fact that Shadowplay isn't working would lead me to think you may have a driver conflict from the upgrade. Have you fired up DDU to see if there are any remains of the driver from the 1080?
 
rockbottom said:
The fact that Shadowplay isn't working would lead me to think you may have a driver conflict from the upgrade. Have you fired up DDU to see if there are any remains of the driver from the 1080?
Click to expand...
I ran DDU when I first got the upgrade, but I also just did a full reinstall of Windows last weekend. Neither seemed to alter the results unfortunately.
 
Your OBS set-up looks OK. Game Mode can be turned on but I doubt it will solve anything since changing the GPU didn't help either.

If the Corsair is operating in surround, switch them to stereo.

From a performance perspective, your on-board audio should blow the doors off these things. Your log is short but if you notice audio lag, re-route audio.

01:09:33.556: WASAPI: Device 'Speakers (Corsair HS65 SURROUND)' [48000 Hz] initialized (source: Desktop Audio)
01:09:33.558: Device for 'Audio Output Capture' source Desktop Audio is also used for audio monitoring.
01:09:33.558: Deduplication logic is being applied to all monitored sources.

Make sure the GPU operating @ x16 4.0.
Get Shadowplay working
Try a different source
Use CQP instead of CBR
 
Shadefyre said:
Hey folks, I'm getting a little desperate because I have been trying out all kinds of settings and trying all kinds of fixes for months now without getting any tangible results. Basically, what I want to do is record smooth gameplay in 1080p at 60fps. Preferably with a constant 50 Mbps bitrate, but I'm not married to CBR. It's just what I was recording/rendering before I took a break from making videos.
Click to expand...
CBR for many livestream platforms, but NOT good for local Recording (wastes bitrate/data storage).

Shadefyre said:
Now I've got a 5070TI, am capturing onto an NVME SSD, and still get the exact same choppiness as I had before the upgrades, despite using even less of my total GPU power than before.
Click to expand...
Well, what else going on in the OS background? What have you done for real-time hardware resource usage monitoring to ensure you don't have a resource bottleneck?

- is that NVMe SSD same as OS drive, or separate. And if separate, how is connected to CPU (not all NVMe slots the same)?
- what does OBS Studio log show you from a session with the choppiness? and rendering/encoding lag/loss?
And, AMD BIOS/driver issues know to have caused stutters/choppiness in certain circumstances... not sure of any of those apply to your situation
 
rockbottom said:
Your OBS set-up looks OK. Game Mode can be turned on but I doubt it will solve anything since changing the GPU didn't help either.

If the Corsair is operating in surround, switch them to stereo.

From a performance perspective, your on-board audio should blow the doors off these things. Your log is short but if you notice audio lag, re-route audio.

01:09:33.556: WASAPI: Device 'Speakers (Corsair HS65 SURROUND)' [48000 Hz] initialized (source: Desktop Audio)
01:09:33.558: Device for 'Audio Output Capture' source Desktop Audio is also used for audio monitoring.
01:09:33.558: Deduplication logic is being applied to all monitored sources.

Make sure the GPU operating @ x16 4.0.
Get Shadowplay working
Try a different source
Use CQP instead of CBR
Click to expand...
I haven't really had any problems with audio lag, it's been an entirely visual issue.
I checked GPU-Z with the render test running and it was running at x16 4.0.
I'm not really sure how to just "get Shadowplay working". I assume that whatever is causing the problem is stemming from there, but I don't know what could be interfering with the encoder chips without also reducing the other GPU capabilities. Could it possibly be a mother board issue, if it's happened on two different cards, isn't a driver issue, and continued to happen on a fresh reinstall of Windows?
For sources, I've been mostly trying Game capture, however I've also been testing Display capture as well. I discovered there are some specific games that I can capture smoothly with Display (especially with emulators). However, there are other games that don't work any better with either.
I did try CQP (16) in my testing, but I was still getting the same issue.
 
"I discovered there are some specific games that I can capture smoothly with Display (especially with emulators). However, there are other games that don't work any better with either."

That's not an OBS issue, the games that don't work most likely have bad frame pacing.
 
Lawrence_SoCal said:
CBR for many livestream platforms, but NOT good for local Recording (wastes bitrate/data storage).


Well, what else going on in the OS background? What have you done for real-time hardware resource usage monitoring to ensure you don't have a resource bottleneck?

- is that NVMe SSD same as OS drive, or separate. And if separate, how is connected to CPU (not all NVMe slots the same)?
- what does OBS Studio log show you from a session with the choppiness? and rendering/encoding lag/loss?
And, AMD BIOS/driver issues know to have caused stutters/choppiness in certain circumstances... not sure of any of those apply to your situation
Click to expand...
Yes, that is what many guides will repeat. However I prefer working with a set bitrate and storage is not an issue. My raw videos are usually around 25GB.
Nothing resource intensive is going on the in the background when I attempt to record.
I've mostly just used Nvidia's resource monitoring HUD to ensure that FPS remains at 60, which watching GPU/CPU usage. When I start a capture, neither of them tend to change by even a percent, and none of the games I've run into this issue with having been using more than 50% of either.

The NVMe is an empty one plugged into the first M.2 slot (Key M). Though I was also getting the same issue before I bought the M.2 when recording to a normal SATA SSD.
The log I included in my post was taken from a capture that was choppy in just those 51 seconds. There's no mention in the log of render lag or dropped frames.

I do actually have the problem where Windows keeps forcing AMD drivers for I assume the motherboard's onboard graphics to reinstall on every reboot. And a the very least I know that can cause some issues because I have to remove and delete it from device manager before I can render a video with Vegas, otherwise Vegas immediately crashes when you hit render as. Do you think that could be a potential factor in this issue?
 
rockbottom said:
"I discovered there are some specific games that I can capture smoothly with Display (especially with emulators). However, there are other games that don't work any better with either."

That's not an OBS issue, the games that don't work most likely have bad frame pacing.
Click to expand...
Surely you don't mean to say that 90% of all games simply have "bad frame pacing" though? Because when I say "specific" I mean "a very small number of the many games I've tested in the past few months". I've tried new games, old games, demanding games, lite games, and the vast majority of them all produce the same issues with nearly the same frequency.
And I'm assuming I should use that good source to capture it and see if it skips frames? Should I do that as a media source, or just the same Display or Window capture?
 
Just wasting space using CBR.

Might want to try without Nvidia's Resource Monitor in play. I don't use it & never have, it may create a conflict with OBS.

Known Application Conflicts | OBS

OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) is free and open source software for video recording and live streaming. Stream to Twitch, YouTube and many other providers or record your own videos with high quality H264 / AAC encoding.
obsproject.com obsproject.com

What mobo do you have?

If a game engine has bad frame pacing, all the games based on that engine are generally flawed.
 
For the test video, you can use Media Source, VLC, Display Capture or Window Capture. The only skips you should see are when the file loops after 60 seconds. Record it & then import the recording into Vegas, go frame by frame, there still should be no skips or duplicate frames.
 
I'm still running W10. But, I have my Windows Update set so it will not install drivers on updates. (Registry update)

Anyway, it appeared in the log that you have the iGPU disabled so not sure why it's still updating the driver.
 
Well, I seem to have finally found the culprit for my ongoing issue, and it's very dumb. My current motherboard is a PRO B650-P WIFI that I originally just picked up so I'd have an AM5 board so I could make use of the 7900X I'd gotten with a pretty decent discount. And at some point in the last two years, I went from using a typical USB Wi-Fi adapter to just using the onboard wifi. Being of the belief that the root of my issue might be motherboard related, I tried disabling the onboard wifi and then recording a few tests with the same settings as before. And what do you know, I was getting captures much closer to what I was used to than the stuttery ones of late. Of course, I had just ordered a Taichi Lite earlier this week because of my suspicions (and because I just wanted a good quality board), so discovering this may not prove to be too important if I end up having no issues with the new board. But I was glad to finally discover something that noticeably causes the problem after months of struggling with little to no progress.
 
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