PositronCannon
New Member
Hi everyone, I've been trying on and off to figure out this issue for months, but no luck so far, so I figured I might as well ask here in case someone has any ideas.
As stated in the title, my issue is that recordings are stuttery due to dropped (duplicate) frames, yet there isn't an apparent cause for it that I can find. OBS never reports anything lower than 60 or 30 fps respectively, logs don't show anything regarding CPU or GPU overload as far as I can tell, and the games themselves are perfectly smooth when playing. The drops tend to come in bursts that manifest as a sustained 0.5-1 second drop to half framerate, but not always, as there are also occasional single duplicate frames here and there, or sequences like "new frame, duplicate, new frame, new frame, duplicate". It feels to me like there's some sort of sync issue between OBS and the games, like OBS occasionally tries to fetch a frame just before it's rendered so it ends up as a duplicate? I dunno, complete guesswork here.
You can see an example of the issue here (as well as every other video in that playlist for that matter), within the first few seconds and regularly throughout the whole video. It's very noticeable here since this game runs at 30 fps, meaning those stuttery parts are the recording essentially dropping to 15 fps for a second. It happens across a variety of games and emulators, so it's not tied to any specific game. The only thing I haven't tested yet is recording from a console via capture card, to at least determine if this issue is exclusive to PC recordings or not (I have a feeling it is), but I'm just beyond done with this stuff for today.
OBS log here.
Things I've tried:
- Lowering resolution in-game and as low as 360p for the recording (both canvas and output), to eliminate performance factors.
- Using both QuickSync and NVENC for recording, always at max performance mode.
- Toggling vsync in the games (though the way I understand it, with windowed mode and the way W10's window compositing works, application vsync is irrelevant anyway).
- Changing my screen refresh rate from 144 Hz to 60 Hz, just in case that was somehow affecting things.
- Using window capture instead of game capture.
- Lowering the bitrate as far as 1000 kbps.
- Recording to HDD instead of SSD (literally no reason why this should improve anything ever but hell if I know anymore).
- Toggling W10's Game Mode on and off.
- Probably more stuff I've forgotten.
- Various combinations of the above.
None of those things seemed to make any difference. At best, any slight improvements seemed to be coincidence more than anything. It's hard to tell since the drops aren't consistent or anything.
So yeah, I'm completely out of ideas here. Hopefully someone can help, because this is a rather annoying issue, knowing you have enough hardware (or much more than enough, as is the case with very lightweight games or emulators) to get smooth recordings but still ending up with a stuttery half-framerate mess every x seconds and having no idea why.
As stated in the title, my issue is that recordings are stuttery due to dropped (duplicate) frames, yet there isn't an apparent cause for it that I can find. OBS never reports anything lower than 60 or 30 fps respectively, logs don't show anything regarding CPU or GPU overload as far as I can tell, and the games themselves are perfectly smooth when playing. The drops tend to come in bursts that manifest as a sustained 0.5-1 second drop to half framerate, but not always, as there are also occasional single duplicate frames here and there, or sequences like "new frame, duplicate, new frame, new frame, duplicate". It feels to me like there's some sort of sync issue between OBS and the games, like OBS occasionally tries to fetch a frame just before it's rendered so it ends up as a duplicate? I dunno, complete guesswork here.
You can see an example of the issue here (as well as every other video in that playlist for that matter), within the first few seconds and regularly throughout the whole video. It's very noticeable here since this game runs at 30 fps, meaning those stuttery parts are the recording essentially dropping to 15 fps for a second. It happens across a variety of games and emulators, so it's not tied to any specific game. The only thing I haven't tested yet is recording from a console via capture card, to at least determine if this issue is exclusive to PC recordings or not (I have a feeling it is), but I'm just beyond done with this stuff for today.
OBS log here.
Things I've tried:
- Lowering resolution in-game and as low as 360p for the recording (both canvas and output), to eliminate performance factors.
- Using both QuickSync and NVENC for recording, always at max performance mode.
- Toggling vsync in the games (though the way I understand it, with windowed mode and the way W10's window compositing works, application vsync is irrelevant anyway).
- Changing my screen refresh rate from 144 Hz to 60 Hz, just in case that was somehow affecting things.
- Using window capture instead of game capture.
- Lowering the bitrate as far as 1000 kbps.
- Recording to HDD instead of SSD (literally no reason why this should improve anything ever but hell if I know anymore).
- Toggling W10's Game Mode on and off.
- Probably more stuff I've forgotten.
- Various combinations of the above.
None of those things seemed to make any difference. At best, any slight improvements seemed to be coincidence more than anything. It's hard to tell since the drops aren't consistent or anything.
So yeah, I'm completely out of ideas here. Hopefully someone can help, because this is a rather annoying issue, knowing you have enough hardware (or much more than enough, as is the case with very lightweight games or emulators) to get smooth recordings but still ending up with a stuttery half-framerate mess every x seconds and having no idea why.
Last edited: