Dota 2, trying to record it is an hell! D:

[cippo95]

Fedora Workstation 35, OBS 27.1.3 (but also tried the 27.2 beta), GTX 1060 6GB, 510.39.01 Nvidia proprietary driver.
TL;DR: I have tried to record Dota 2 in the last few days and I had a lot of issues! I really wanted to make it work but I give up! xD

Tried OBS from flatpak but also rpmfusion, they work pretty much the same.

1. When recording even without capturing Dota 2, the game lags every 4-5 seconds, just with this is already unusable:
   • Even recording an empty scene, no matter if NVENC or x264 is used, Dota lags periodically and it doesn't when I stop recording.
   • I have found out that running obs with super user privileges fixes this, but it is a pain because obs with su privileges has a different folder for profiles, scenes, plugins, bypass the system font... it is a weird experience compared what I remember on Windows.
   • I have tried to open my backups with su privileges with the flatpak version but it doesn't open the file manager (wtf?), while the rpmfusion does it with a different file manager (not nautilus): so until yesterday (read the second issue) rpmfusion's obs with su privileges could have been my go to.
2. It wasn't enough also capturing works randomly:
   • Recording desktop and playing always work (but to avoid flickering you need to disable flipping in Nvidia drivers, known stuff for technical reasons). I like to use also G-Sync when I don't record, having to open and close Nvidia's settings to put flipping on and off is a pain but I have found out that recording the window with xcomposite works fine without disabling flipping (probably it does it automatically for the window it captures), fine by me!
   • Today I boot my system, it does some update, I want to test again the periodic lag without su privileges... Window capturing Dota doesn't work anymore!

This is hell! xD
I'm not hating on anyone, just sharing my experience.

Looking at my recording, fps and gpu usage drop the same time, it is not at its limits there is clearly some process priority fighting going on here that is fixed running obs as admin... apart capturing itself, maybe it would be good to have an easy way to run obs as admin without weirdness (different profiles, fonts etc.), like a setting to check that when we open obs it asks for su privileges.

I include a log file while using the 27.2 beta (should be latest test I have done this morning).

 

[cippo95]

I should study for my last 3 exams at the university but I'm still testing stuff... fun before work they say!
I have found the "guy" behind all my problems it seems... it is called GNOME Desktop Environment.
I have installed i3 window manager (I was wondering this change for a while):

• Windows capturing works (it shows a still frame in the preview, but looking at the recording it works).
• No huge frame drops anymore.

I have used all sort of DEs before, now it is time to learn to use windows managers I guess, probably I will install the i3 Fedora spin.
I don't recommend this for new Linux users it could be challenging for various reasons, I think DEs are more user friendly for our way of using computers nowadays.