Choppy audio whenever I start OBS and also record / Game lagging when recording OBS

theSpectrum

New Member
Hello, recently whenever I open OBS I hear everything in low quality that is being displayed in my device, it happens the same in the end result after recording, currently I have seen other forums about removing the lag for my OBS recording, it only worked whenever I opened Chrome or any tab that wasn't a game, but when I open up a game it still lags, and the thing is that months ago I never experienced any of this and recorded well as the only thing that I changed was the bitrate settings, CPU profile use and the profile, I reset its settings and now it's laggy, I did one of the things some of the forums said to "change mp4 to mkv", "run OBS as administrator", none of these things worked as I used to record in MP4 back then and I didn't lag.

I also have questions about the encoder which is something I'm really worried about since I've seen other tutorial videos and the only thing they say is to "use the NVENC encoder", but that's not something I have and I already checked, only "x264" and "QuickSync H.264", some of the forums I read said that x264 consumes a lot from your GPU, and other tutorials recommended x264 if not having NVENC, I've never heard any of them about QuickSync, can someone help?

Processor: 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-1235U 1.30 GHz
RAM: 8 GB
Graphics card: Intel(R) UHD Graphics
 

koala

Active Member
x264 is a software encoder that runs on the CPU. Since there is a CPU in every computer, this encoder is always available. The other encoders you mention are hardware encoders and available, if your computer has the corresponding GPU hardware. Nvenc is only present in Nvidia GPUs, and Quicksync is only available in Intel GPUs. Since you have an Intel GPU only, you have Quicksync as hardware encoder only.
X264 will produce a lot of CPU usage, while the hardware encoders run on the GPU and use no CPU resources. Nvenc is a dedicated circuit on Nvidia CPUs and uses almost no additional GPU resources (so essentially it's free if it comes to resources in general). Quicksync will use a small part of the Intel GPU resources.

Run Tools > Auto configuration wizard to get a tested and working configuration that will probably include Quicksync as encoder. If you need the CPU for the thing you capture, probably a game, stick with it to not consume all CPU resources with x264.
 

Lawrence_SoCal

Active Member
The U in your CPU model means ultra-low power for long battery life in a laptop.
so, basically worst possible match for computationally demanding real-time video encoding. so keep you expectations appropriate for your hardware.
Also, it will be advisable to learn about real-time hardware resource (CPU, RAM, Disk, etc) monitoring as well as how to identify thermal throttling with your specific make/model laptop (I'm not aware of a generic approach)
Also, 8GB of RAM may be on the low side, you may need to be attentive to (ie avoiding unnecessary) background processes, especially those that consume too much RAM and/or CPU
 

theSpectrum

New Member
Hi, sorry for the late reply, I'm seeing that the video quality is all going really good now, the problem is the audio and it sounds very choppy, in this video you can hear the bass but I can only hear that when I close OBS so it goes back to the normal audio, when I have OBS opened I only hear loud choppy audio. I use the Skullcandy Crusher Evos for the videos, is there any solution to this?
 
Top