Choppy recording but no missed or dropped frames (please help)

[spyraklas]

Hi there, I've tried everything I can and I don't know what the problem is unfortunately.

My video recordings have brief moments where the framerate is obviously lower and the video goes choppy for about 1 second or so. Those moments are somewhat frequent. I've got a video recording clearly showing the effect. I've also got a log file.

OBS stats dock shows no frames missed or skipped. GPU usage was between 40% to 50% throughout. GPU video encoding utilisation was around 35% throughout. Memory usage seems to be around 60%.

Viewing the video in either VLC or windows media player shows framerate dropped at the same spot.

Here are some things I've tried to fix the issue so far:
- Turned DVR off. No change.
- Running OBS as administrator. No change.
- Switching from writing to external drive to writing to internal drive M.2 ssd with write cache enabled (checked in Device Manager). No change.
- Switched from 24,000 kbps bitrate to 10,000 kbps bitrate. Issue still exists. However, it's hard to tell if this might have improved things a bit.
- Anti-virus turned off (temporarily). No change.
- Psycho visual tuning off. No change.

Log file: https://obsproject.com/logs/oBpuRyvLN9a15bB8

 

[PaiSand]

Don't use CBR for recording. Instead use CQP.
The best thing you can do is run the Auto-configuration Wizard (tools menu) and apply the settings it gives. Do NOT change it. Restart OBS. Yes, it's important to restart OBS.
Perform a test recording (as is, do not change a thing) of at least 30 seconds doing as you normally do, including playing games, full camera or whatever you normally do. Stay away from advance output, keep it in simple.

You can change the quality you want in the recoding section and test again.

 

[SweetLolliePops]

What kind of drive are you recording to? I have found trying to record 4k HDR to an external Samsung drive to be problematic, just as you describe. When I record to my M.2 hard drives, I have no issues.
Some hard drives do not have adequate write speeds to handle OBS recording at high bitrates.

 

[spyraklas]

@PaiSand thank you for the help. I did try more things like using CQP, using NVIDIA NVENC AV1 and other combinations of settings. The best at the moment that balances the ocassional lag and quality seems to be CQP 22 and NVIDIA NVENC AV1. I tried the auto configuration wizard as well and after glancing at the settings, it gave me slightly lower ones that seem to work smoothly.

As a result, my going theory at the moment is that even though OBS is saying no missed or skipped frames it still can't handle them smoothly. Possibly because my CPU and other components aren't powerful enough.

@SweetLolliePops During my testing, I started with the external Samsung but switched to my internal SSD m.2 drive with a rating of > 500 mb/s read speed and write speed. Didn't notice a difference unfortunately.

 

[Thelavanation]

Sorry to bring up an old post. But I'm having the same issue right now. Did you ever completely fix your issue?