Question / Help Dropped frames despite best efforts.

[Garrett K]

Hello, So I have been attempting to record game clips with OBS. And I keep experiencing loss of frames despite every bit of advice I have been given.

Current Specs:
CPU: Intel i7-4790 3.60GHZ
32 GB RAM
Samsung SSD 860 EVO 1TB
TOSHIBA External USB 1TB Hard Drive (Where recording are put)
GPU: GTX 1070 Ti

I used OBS for two years without having any loss of frames until recently. Logs are linked below. I have read forum posts and haven't found them useful. Any advice is appreciated!

 

[Narcogen]

Check that game mode is off, although it does not look like rendering lag is your problem.

16:54:50.660: Video stopped, number of skipped frames due to encoding lag: 275/676 (40.7%)
16:57:14.247: adding 21 milliseconds of audio buffering, total audio buffering is now 64 milliseconds
17:05:27.536: adding 21 milliseconds of audio buffering, total audio buffering is now 85 milliseconds
17:17:46.441: adding 21 milliseconds of audio buffering, total audio buffering is now 106 milliseconds

The above is indication of significant CPU overload. Does it go away if you go from veryfast to superfast?

Also you will get better results using CRF or CQP for recording than CBR, which is more appropriate for streaming.

 

[Garrett K]

I have spent the day attempting to fix the problems using your methods yet I still have extreme resolution drop and frame loss. I want to use this for recording only

Check that game mode is off, although it does not look like rendering lag is your problem.

16:54:50.660: Video stopped, number of skipped frames due to encoding lag: 275/676 (40.7%)
16:57:14.247: adding 21 milliseconds of audio buffering, total audio buffering is now 64 milliseconds
17:05:27.536: adding 21 milliseconds of audio buffering, total audio buffering is now 85 milliseconds
17:17:46.441: adding 21 milliseconds of audio buffering, total audio buffering is now 106 milliseconds

The above is indication of significant CPU overload. Does it go away if you go from veryfast to superfast?

Also you will get better results using CRF or CQP for recording than CBR, which is more appropriate for streaming.

 

[Narcogen]

If you have changed your settings and done more recording sessions, please provide the log of those sessions so any changes can be observed.

 

[Garrett K]

Sorry, thanks for the notice. I turned off Game Bar and such, is this a problem resulting from my cpu? I never thought obs was CPU intensive?

 

[Narcogen]

The game features more affect GPU performance, but OBS can absolutely be CPU intensive depending on how you use it-- how many sources you have, how complex your scenes are, how many scenes you have, which encoder you are using.

16:04:13.106: - scene 'Scene':
16:04:13.106: - source: 'Game Capture' (game_capture)
16:04:13.106: - source: 'Display Capture' (monitor_capture)

Mixing game and display captures in the same scene will hurt performance. Sources stay active and consume resources even when 'hidden'.

16:04:52.852: [x264 encoder: 'recording_h264'] settings:
16:04:52.852: rate_control: CBR
16:04:52.852: bitrate: 2000
16:04:52.852: buffer size: 2000
16:04:52.852: crf: 0
16:04:52.852: fps_num: 60
16:04:52.852: fps_den: 1
16:04:52.852: width: 1920
16:04:52.852: height: 1080
16:04:52.852: keyint: 250

1080p30 with a bitrate of 2000 is... not going to look pretty. If you need files that small, drop to 30fps and/or a smaller frame size, like 720p.

For recording you should generally be using CRF rate control with a value somewhere between 15 and 23. The lower the number, the larger the files and the better the quality can be. The preset controls how hard your CPU works on the encode. So if you have encoder overload, you can go to a faster preset (lower quality, less load) or a lower framerate or a smaller framesize.

I don't see any dropped frames in this log, but it's possible it just wasn't long enough (only five seconds).

16:04:53.177: ==== Recording Start ===============================================
16:04:53.177: [ffmpeg muxer: 'adv_file_output'] Writing file 'C:/Users/theco/Desktop/Videos/2019-01-29 16-04-52.mp4'...
16:04:58.604: [ffmpeg muxer: 'adv_file_output'] Output of file 'C:/Users/theco/Desktop/Videos/2019-01-29 16-04-52.mp4' stopped
16:04:58.604: Output 'adv_file_output': stopping
16:04:58.604: Output 'adv_file_output': Total frames output: 302
16:04:58.604: Output 'adv_file_output': Total drawn frames: 325
16:04:58.604: ==== Recording Stop ================================================

 

[DKRecords]

You have a 1070 Why not just stream using that?