Question / Help Dropped Frames/Choppy Stream during explosions, etc

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Sigmakan

New Member
Posting from work, so I dont have the log file available, but I'll post it later.

Anyway, I've been streaming FFXIV and I usually get a very stable stream, but when huge explosions happen or large particle effects my stream pretty much freeze. Here are a few examples:

http://www.twitch.tv/sigmakan/c/2863706
http://www.twitch.tv/sigmakan/c/2863694

I originally thought this was a connection issue, but the fact that it only happens during special effects like the ones shown in the videos I'm thinking its more of a hardware issue. If so, what settings do I need to adjust? Im not sure of my current settings at the moment (will post when I get home).

Thanks!
 
T

Tidy

Member
If it only happens during those moments, i would think its system lag? Does it lag in the game at all - or smooth as butter?
 
K

Kharay

Member
Particle Effects. If you experience lag during explosions and such, that typically is as a result of very high settings on particle effects. Try toning those down heavily to see if the problem goes away.
 
S

Sigmakan

New Member
Kharay said:
Particle Effects. If you experience lag during explosions and such, that typically is as a result of very high settings on particle effects. Try toning those down heavily to see if the problem goes away.
Click to expand...

Wouldn't I lag in game as well if that was the case? (I'm really quite ignorant about all this, so please feel free to tell me I'm wrong)
 
K

Kharay

Member
Not necessarily. Consider the following: both the game as well as OBS take time to render/encode/process frames. It could simply be that during those explosions the game is given enough time to render its frames but still puts enough of an additional strain on the CPU/GPU for there to be no more time to also let OBS do its thing.
 
K

Kharay

Member
When tweaking OBS, feel free to have a look at those log files yourself. One of the first (and most important) sections to look for is this one:
02:23:24: Total frames rendered: 151658, number of late frames: 3782 (2.49%) (it's okay for some frames to be late)
02:23:24: RTMPPublisher::SocketLoop: Graceful loop exit
02:23:24: Number of times waited to send: 1046, Waited for a total of 4003812 bytes
02:23:24: Number of b-frames dropped: 2999 (2%), Number of p-frames dropped: 5754 (3.8%), Total 8753 (5.8%)
Click to expand...
Late frames: PC performance falling behind. As the entry says, it is OK for some frames to be late. Although I personally always strive for limiting it to 1% at the most. So, in my opinion, your log does suggest an issue with the PC's performance.
Dropped frames: Connection falling behind. Ideally, you want this number to be 0% and in your case it actually is at a level that does warrant some attention as well. Some things you could try: switching Twitch's servers and if that does not solve it, start dropping the bitrate in steps of 50 Kbps at a time until the dropped frames are reduced to 0%.
 
S

Sigmakan

New Member
Thanks for the insight, I dropped my game settings down a few notches and getting noticeably better streams. I also switched Twitch servers and lowered the bitrate a bit and no longer getting dropped frames.

When I ran the benchmark for this game at maximum settings I got an "extremely high" score, so its a bit odd to me that I need to lower the settings so much just to get the stream to run smoothly.
 
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