Constantly crashes, awful performance about 80% of the time

T3K4

New Member
So so, I have a 3080Ti which I was encoding in Nvenc Max quality preset, psycho on B frames 4 etc ... @6Mbits on twitch. So far, working good and stream is smooth and good, but still not good enough imo... Besides the fact that competitive players as I am needs a perfectly smooth, input lag free, constant capped fps to play in optimum conditions, which isnt totally the case when I render with my 3080Ti while playing. (rig : 10900Kf@5.2 all core, ram 32Gb 4200C16, 3080ti, Asus Formula XII, 1000w psu, monitor 27" QHD@270hz, win 11 pro).

I am a veteran twitch streamer (2014) and I ve been through all the OBS preset since the begining of its era (x264, nvenc 1,2, New etc..) with different CPUs and GPUs ofc.
I have the minimum process running on that PC (kaspersky off, all the overlays (fps eaters, and input lag as well) off, webcam off, scenes on minimum numbers, anyway, I am optimizing my rig to be as much light as possible./

When I stream with my Main PC, I still feel that my (main) game sometimes stutters, input lag is there, late game situations (when fps are dropping heavily for everybody) are even more a nightmare when I stream, reactivity etc ... are impacted.

I have then a second rig : 10850k @51 all core, 16Gb 3600C16, asus formula XII (again lol), 980FTW.

I, ofc, encode in x264, medium preset, High profile, 1080p60, lanczos, OBS priority "above normal", without a capture card (because there is no one existing that can duplicate QHD@270 or even 240hz at the very moment, the elgato 4kmk2 can only duplicate QHD@144hz), but using the NDI protocol to transmit the signal to my 2nd PC.
Meaning, using my network to send my signal to my second OBS (you need good ethernet ports with medium or high CPU affinity preset, at least 120Mbits that can run smoothless between your two PCs). The encoding is alright, medium being largly achievable with a i9 10 cores but I experience here stutters, my twitch rendering being way sharper than Nvenc but not smooth at all, with drops of frames, frameloss etc ...
I have no clue if it comes to the NDI protocol that loss packets in the process or simply because x264 encoding has been kinda abandonned by OBS itself since Nvenc is performing so good those days.
I will try to encode today in Fast, or faster preset to assess if it runs smoother ...

In your case emele, I would go for a driver/hardware issues with your cpu/MB and OS drivers. You arnt the first one I hear that has issues encoding with an AMD cpu and having OBS crashing all the time. It might just come from OBS itself not stable enough for AMD plateform, especially when it comes to hard encoding with very consuming preset.
Besides, reading several forums, the difference @6Mbits sec between very low and medium/faster preset is unsignificantly visible, if your bitrate was around 100Mbit, then, yeah it would, but with such a small bandwith, very low is actually pretty useless, you should use "at leas" medium or faster, twitch encoding besides your rendering (as youtube does when you send a hiqh quality video), no one would see a difference between very slow or medium (except if you are standing still, you might see some more accurate details) but for high motion games, the bottleneck is the bitrate anyway.

All of that said, I invite you to use MSI_util_v3, a standalone software, and check if all your hardware component are checked (except the high definition audio). Then I would try to find/seek a process responsible for those crash, for instance Ryzen master, Adrenalin, Msi AB, and all those kind of softwares.

I wanted to post here in the first instance to get some help in my encoding issues, knowing there is a lot of "options/codes" available to use in x264 to render with a better quality, i am looking for someone mastering that codec with OBS to improve my stream.
So far, I never found better than medium, high prof, above normal, 1080p60 (I might come back to 900p60 or 1080p48 since 6000Kbits is such a small bitrate ...
If anyone can help me, I would appreciate.

Thank you ! and sorry for that long post
 

emele

New Member
Yes, there is certainly something very wrong if I can stream without a hiccup for 5 hours @ X264 very slow and less than 1% frame drop, but most of the time I get massive frame drop in the same game and the same types of scenarios, even on Fast or on NVENC. People telling me to not use X264 on a 16-core CPU running a game that occupies barely a couple cores because I don't have the juice for it are plain wrong. Something else is going on, but it seems pretty obvious by now that I am mostly on my own.

Thank you T3K4 for your experience and advice. I will look into all of these things.
 

T3K4

New Member
I would put a coin on a driver issue, or, try to check the integrity files of that game on steam (mb the game is corrupted somewhere ?).

Besides emele, there are some softwares where you can allocate manually which apps is handled by which core. Let's say you force the game to run on core 1/2/3/4 and OBS on cores 10/11/12../16. Then there won't be any "interferance" of PID or threads ressources between your game and your OBS, and it might also release your CPU high usage.
I can assure you, that yesterday i ve tried another preset on x264 for "fast motion" games, from medium to fast and it changed considerably the image in a better way, still because of that 6Mbit limitation of twitch which make the "very slow" preset pretty useless.
Even in local recording, you wont gain much in quality between very slow and medium with a 100Mbits bitrate (which is huge already...).
There are a lot of websites dedicated to x264 preset and encoding, all of them claiming that below medium, it is pretty useless unless you are enconding a huge raw 4K video with a 400/500 Mbits bitrate... Besides, presets below medium tends to have a extremly high CPU affinity and whatever the CPU you have (even comparing with Xeon/Threadripper Cpus), there will be drops and issues with it.
Why ? I m not such an expert to explain it but I just read those lines about people that know what they are talking about.
That's it, my advice is to check your drivers/softwares/hardware issues and/or the game itself, all of those with a medium preset minimum.
Forget all the preset below since your bitrate isnt higher than 100Mbits right ?
 

chlersrestrw

New Member
It seems really random. SOMETIMES my stream works perfectly, but most of the time I get terrible encoding or rendering lag.

My system is:

Ryzen 9 5950X 16-core, 32-threads, 4.7ghz
32 Gb DDR-4 3600
GTX 1060 (sigh)

I use the CPU to encode, but clearly this CPU is plenty capable of encoding a stream at very high quality and play any game at the same time.

The log file is here: https://obsproject.com/logs/0G6VRlzQI8tLeqkB

Thanks!!!
Do you find the solution. I have not pc like yours's but i havei5-7th generation laptop and while i live stream on youtube got same log error.
 

emele

New Member
Do you find the solution. I have not pc like yours's but i havei5-7th generation laptop and while i live stream on youtube got same log error.
I have not entirely debugged it but I found out something. I use Acronis True Image for backing up my PC. One of its processes, called "mms_mini.exe" seems to interfere with OBS, maybe by latching on to the same ports, or something else, I don't know. Anyway, just quitting that whole process tree makes everything run MUCH smoother.

Other than that, it appears the random order in which things load upon booting has something to do with my issue. Once I boot, if it works well, it will keep on working well until the next reboot. And when it doesn't work well, it won't stream smoothly until I reboot at least once.

And to T3K4 about my "high CPU utilization" that's the thing: even streaming on veryslow I don't even touch 40% load on the CPU, no matter if the stream works perfectly or if it's dropping 90% of frames. I don't have high cpu utilization, my problem is something else.
 

emele

New Member
To add more about this, restarting my PC has made streaming much much better. I need to restart before firing up OBS and things run much smoother. I can encode at VerySlow without any issues whatsoever now.
 

emele

New Member
So after further investigation and experimentation, here's what happens.

First, the settings:
Resolution: 1920x1080, 60fps
Encoder: X264
Rescale: nope
Rate Control: ABR
Bitrate: 6000
Use custom buffer size: 5500
Keyframe Interval: 0 (should I change this? I stream mostly fast paced shooters)
CPU Preset: VerySlow
Profile: High
Tune: (none) (should I change this?)
x264 Options: rc_lookahead=20 bframes=4 (I think I'll try with 6?)

When I start streaming, I get skipped frames due to encoding lag. It starts low and grows up to over 90%, while CPU utilization remains in the 25% to 35% range mostly. So obviously this doesn't work.

Then I change the CPU Preset to VeryFast and I get no encoding lag (obviously).

Then after a few minutes I change it back to VerySlow and I still get perfect performance and excellent image quality with my CPU load below 40%.

Any idea why this happens? Also, should I make a separate thread about this?
 
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