Question / Help CPU load issues while streaming

[qwerty12]

I've been trying to use OBS to stream several games the last couple of days, including fallout 3,League of legends and the witcher 2, and an occuring issue is that OBS shoots up to 50-65% CPU usage, often uses more CPU than the actual game and makes most games unplayable and the stream is pretty choppy. I've gone through the OBS optimization test where it told me I should be able to stream games just fine. Is there an issue with the settings that could be resolved?

Logs:

http://pastebin.com/mFMvjurd

http://pastebin.com/NFJ0KbSb

http://pastebin.com/K5eC4mkh

 

[Krazy]

50-65% CPU is about what you should expect when streaming at 720p-1080p and gaming at the same time. Streaming is incredibly CPU intensive, much more so than playing games.

Not entirely sure why games are choppy for you, your hardware should not be holding you back here at all. Do you have all the latest drivers? You should be using either Game Capture, or Window Capture with Aero enabled. You may also want to consider enabling VSync, or otherwise cap your framerate to give OBS room to work on your GPU.

In your third log, the last "session" seemed like it worked as intended for you. Window Capture with almost no lagged frames at all at 720p30fps encoding.

 

[qwerty12]

When I said 50-65% cpu I meant that OBS alone ate up that much, it's not both gaming and OBS combined.

 

[qwerty12]

A friend of mine tested streaming on his own pc with a lesser processor, and that only took up 20% cpu streaming the same game, encoding it in a higher resolution. Something must be off somewhere.

 

[Xianahru]

DOnt use monitor capture, use Game or windowcapture. Monitorcapture is by far the slowest one unless you use Windows 8, which you are not.

 

[qwerty12]

DOnt use monitor capture, use Game or windowcapture. Monitorcapture is by far the slowest one unless you use Windows 8, which you are not.

I've been trying all three to see if there was a difference. Usually, it starts out fine, but then 5-10 minutes in it shoots up. It's like as if it's a huge CPU leak.

 

[enilsen16]

I have been having a similar issue too.

Would a card like the Avermedia Live Gamer HD help in this kind of situation?

Could you use a laptop to stream your games and you PC to play the games? if so how would you go about doing that? Wouldn't that fix the CPU issues?

 

[qwerty12]

It literally shoots up to 100% CPU streaming my background with nothing else going on. Something has to be up. There is no way OBS should max out my CPU streaming nothing but my desktop.

http://pastebin.com/P0FYSRjJ

 

[R1CH]

DOnt use monitor capture, use Game or windowcapture. Monitorcapture is by far the slowest one unless you use Windows 8, which you are not.

I've been trying all three to see if there was a difference. Usually, it starts out fine, but then 5-10 minutes in it shoots up. It's like as if it's a huge CPU leak.

Sounds like your CPU might be overheating and throttling. Check your temperatures / cooling.

 

[Xianahru]

The log says you are still using Monitor Capture. Make sure to delete all scenes and start from scratch.

 

[Xianahru]

I have been having a similar issue too.

Would a card like the Avermedia Live Gamer HD help in this kind of situation?

In a single PC setup, no, it wouldnt really change a thing. Capture cards only capture, this is usually done by the GPU via OBS and is faster than a capture card. The part that is loading your CPU so much is the encoding part.

You can however get a dedicated streaming PC with a capture card and play the game on your first machine and encode on your second.

 

[hilalpro]

Run "C:\Windows\System32\perfmon.exe /res" and post a screenshot of the CPU usage spike from there.

 

[qwerty12]

DOnt use monitor capture, use Game or windowcapture. Monitorcapture is by far the slowest one unless you use Windows 8, which you are not.

I've been trying all three to see if there was a difference. Usually, it starts out fine, but then 5-10 minutes in it shoots up. It's like as if it's a huge CPU leak.

Sounds like your CPU might be overheating and throttling. Check your temperatures / cooling.

this was the issue. My corsair H70 wasn't working correctly. CPU was up to 101 degrees celcius, hopefully having fixed that everything should run fine.

 

[faxin]

Having 99-100% load while streaming bf3 at 720p is normal for a 3570k oc @ 4.1 ? Thought the i5 was good but damn its not good at all...

 

[alpinlol]

the i5 is only real good for game performance as soons as you want to play games and stream you gonna run into peformance issues with cpu intense games especially like bf3 since even my i7 runs into the 60-80% when i stream 720@60 on fast preset and play bf3 :/