Question / Help Encoding overload even with Overkill CPU

[Power_Stone]

With some games ( namely League of Legends to my knowledge ) keep giving me this issue, i watch the performance tab of windows task manager and it shows that im only using the first 4 threads out of my available 20 threads ( im running a 6950x ), and this is on the faster encoding preset, i have tried to change the affinity but that doesnt help either. anyone know of any possible fixes i might have missed? some information that wont be included in the log file is i have the game capped to 60fps and its in window borderless though im not sure if that changes anything.

 

[BK-Morpheus]

Can you create a new/emtpy scene collection and create just one scene with a game capture source in there to test?
Not sure about the strange thread usage, but monitor capture is not as efficient performing as game capture and browser sources could also cause problems, so just to make sure that the problem has nothing to do with the sources, I'd recommend to do a test with a clean scene collection.

 

[Power_Stone]

Can you create a new/emtpy scene collection and create just one scene with a game capture source in there to test?
Not sure about the strange thread usage, but monitor capture is not as efficient performing as game capture and browser sources could also cause problems, so just to make sure that the problem has nothing to do with the sources, I'd recommend to do a test with a clean scene collection.

I like to stream using desktop capture mainly because i like the desktop being there when im backing out of a game or switch games, i would run both desktop and capture however, i was experiencing worse issues then because OBS was trying to run both of them at the same time as they were loaded into the same scene. i attached the log of a brand new install of OBS 22.0.2 and only the game capture as a source, still only getting only 4 threads of work when OBS is streaming.

 

[BK-Morpheus]

Ok, so the main problem really seems to be the thread usage of OBS.
Can you at least see CPU loads hitting over 70% on those 4 threads (so not overall CPU load, but single threads/cores)?

 

[Power_Stone]

Yeah I see on the cpu that the first 4 threads are getting pushed all the way to 100% and still won't utilize other cores

 

[Power_Stone]

Anyone else have any help on this?

 

[Deleted member 121471]

Are you using any antivirus?

When you manually set CPU affinity to OBS, which threads are you assigning to OBS?

 

[Power_Stone]

Are you using any antivirus?

When you manually set CPU affinity to OBS, which threads are you assigning to OBS?

No anti-virus

I have tried assigning all threads except the 4 being used by League of Legends and it makes things worse

 

[Deleted member 121471]

Your latest log shows 2 different base resolutions, 1080p and 1440p so I was wondering, what's your monitor resolution?

You could try adding threads=8 to your custom x264 settings and running OBS as admin, for troubleshooting purposes. Another thing that might help is assigning the first few cores/threads to OBS and the last 4cores/8 threads to the game.

Lastly, can you confirm if your Windows 10 and GPU drivers are set to max performance and that fast startup is disabled? They are likely unrelated but I've had encoding issues in the past caused by these.

 

[Power_Stone]

My monitor resolution is 1440p, I have since changed my base canvas resolution to Match that as I read elsewhere that was a better thing to do since I'm scaling it down to 720p output anyway

I have checked and rechecked fast boot and gpu max performance and both of those are as they should be

I'll check to see if your other suggestions help

 

[Power_Stone]

even with your suggested trouble shooting steps i am still getting very similar thread utilization with the same results for streaming with encoder overload

 

[DEDRICK]

Does the issue still occur if you use Display Capture? Delete your Game Capture for now.

Does it only occur when playing league of Legends? Does it still occur if you disable SMT in the BIOS(Hyper-threading)?

 

[Power_Stone]

doesnt matter how I'm capturing this happens, and yes as far as I have seen this is only league of legends

edit: here is a pic of maxed out doom at 1440p with same encoding settings

 

[DEDRICK]

I added to my post, what happens if you disable Hyper-threading in the BIOS, besides the obvious.

 

[Power_Stone]

here is with smt disabled, ended up making the problem worse

 

[DEDRICK]

Looking at your DOOM picture we know the encoder and game are using all 20 threads, so we know OBS is working correctly in that it is capable of using all 20 threads to encode.

The likelyhood of it being anything to do with your scenes/sources or settings is slim, there's only so many things you can change and none of them other than threads=x could limit threads.

It is specifically League of Legends that is causing the encoder to limit itself to 4 Threads. I can only find one other thread with this issue but I also saw it on Reddit the other day too.

https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/only-2-cores-4-threads-in-use-while-in-game.79576/

 

[Power_Stone]

yeah thats about where my thinking was lying in that its an issue with the design of the league game software, guess ill just have to get a HD60s and offload the encoding to my laptop for streaming, thanks for the help on this!