Dual PC (laptop) with Elgato HD60 S+ and OBS setup, micro lag/stutter

[Piec3s]

Hello,

I am trying to get my Elgato HD60 S+ to work through a dual laptop setup with OBS Studio. Currently the footage, both video and audio are decent but when I compare the gameplay on my Gaming laptop (2nd screen) the footage is significantly smoother than the footage on my recording laptop, both in OBS preview as well as in recorded footage. It is subtle but clear.

My specs:

Gaming Laptop
Lenovo Legion Pro 7
Intel i9 with 32GB Ram
Nvidia RTX4090
Windows 11
Connected to an LG screen, type: 27GL850
Running at 3840 x 2160 (recommended)

Capture Laptop
Acer Predator Helios 300
Intel i7 with 16 GB Ram
Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti
Window 10
Running at 1920 x 1080 (recommended)

These are connected through an Elgato HD60 S+. The USB from the Elgato is connected to a confirmed USB 3.0 port (checked through device manager and has a blue marker).

I have tried the following without any noticeable impact:

• I reduced the game settings on my gaming laptop (e.g. Resolution to 2560 x 1440), no change
• Tried multiple OBS Output/recoding settings (H.264, HEVC and X264 - Rate control CBR, CQP and various bit rate numbers (10,000 and 15,000), no change
  • I did notice a marginal improvement after setting Tuning to "Ultra Low Latency" and Multipass Mode to "Single Pass"
• Tried multi cables (Both HDMI and USB) and ports (tried all blue USB ports on my laptop), no change

I also ran the stats viewer. I am not incurring skipped frames and I am rarely getting Missed Frames due to rendering lag.

As mentioned the game footage is decent, and I am close to accepting it but it is just not as smooth as on my gaming display. Today I recorded Baldurs Gate 3 footage (which I think is a fairly resource heavy game) and looking back the footage it is decent, but I then compared to some of the gameplay footage on Youtube and it looks as smooth as on my gaming screen.

Any insight or advice into why it is not as smooth would be appreciated. I spent the last 2 evenings trying to get this to work and I am not making any headway.

Thank you and have a great weekend!
Piec3s

 

[Piec3s]

Adding my latest log file of this morning of 5 minutes of recording. Here: https://obsproject.com/logs/WUFUVdOCFJqQi4aj

I do have issues with audio, today I had to reset my setting in the Advanced audio settings to actually hear sound (select another option in Audio monitoring and then go back to my original option).

The other thing is that the log shows critical CPU usage. The weird thing is that when I look at View - Stats during streaming in rarely goes above 5% CPU usage. I guess I need to close other programs to see if this improves. Is the Audio the potential issue why my footage is not smooth?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Piec3s]

I can no longer edit my previous post so adding a new reply, sorry.

I checked the Task Manager while playing Baldur's Gate 3 to check the load on my CPU. During playing it sticks around 15% with spikes hitting 25%. The GPU (Nvidia) is at around 60% load.