Question / Help Encoding overload with low CPU usage

[A ZACH ON TITAN]

I wanted to see if anyone could help configure my stream better. initially I had it set up with an output of 480p. On average it would use about 7% CPU and I would still get overload warnings. I changed the setting this morning to stream in 720p because the quality at 480p was awful. I used the estimator to configure my settings for 720p and it seems to be alright other than the issue of encoding overload that happens occasionally. Which I don't believe my CPU is at fault beings I have a core I7 7500U. I could be wrong though. I also tried to use the analyzer before posting to save time but it kept saying unknown error. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Below is the link to my current log file for the last stream that I just did with my new settings. I can provide a log file of the 480p settings I was using as well upon request.

https://gist.github.com/e2e9537cc2064765db65b0f3073312c4

Thank you,
Zach :)

 

[C-Dude]

What is your internet speed? your bitrate is insanely low. Also don't use a custom buffer size, that might be messing it up. You will want to increase your bitrate to like 1000 but since:

08:29:46.763: Output 'adv_stream': Number of skipped frames due to encoding lag: 6138 (13.6%)
08:29:46.763: Output 'adv_stream': Number of dropped frames due to insufficient bandwidth/connection stalls: 2153 (4.8%)

It seems as your internet is too slow even for this.

Try streaming at with a 800 bitrate with custom buffer size unchecked and see if you are still getting the problem. You may want to try a 360p stream as well.

 

[A ZACH ON TITAN]

my internet speed ranges from about 1mbps to 1.5mbps. When streaming at 480p I had my bitrate set to 500kbps. Once I moved my stream up to 720p I raised it to 850kbps. Would 480p possibly look a little better if I kept the bitrate at 850 but dropped back down to 480p? With the custom buffer size I just added that when I started streaming at 720p as the estimator recommended it. When I would stream at 480p I had that option unchecked and still got the encoding overload pretty frequently with only about 7% CPU usage.

 

[C-Dude]

hmm I'm not entirely sure then. The lowest you would pretty much ever want to stream at 720p is 1500, any lower than that and you really should go down to 480p, it will look a lot better.

Try changing your CPU preset to superfast or ultrafast and see if that fixes your encoding overloaded problem.

 

[A ZACH ON TITAN]

I'll try streaming 480p with the 850kbps bitrate and see if that makes it a little less "blocky" looking. I switched to superfast on CPU. Is it normal to experience the overloading with such a low CPU usage though? Maybe it's because the game I'm playing is using a lot of CPU? Thank you for the help by the way, I really appreciate it.

 

[sekkuar]

^

While the average is 7% CPU usage, it can spike up to 25% usage on x264 encoder depending on how much movement there is on the screen.

If you're having CPU issues, you probably should try hardware (NVENC) encoding instead.

I also see you're on a dual GPU notebook, so make sure OBS is using the "high performance" GPU and not the integrated graphics.

 

[C-Dude]

like seekuar said you can use NVENC. But the quality of nvenc at such low bitrates is awful.

Ignore the CPU usage percentage, your CPU isn't fast enough if you are getting encoding overloaded. Higher res at a lower bitrate will make it look more blocky, if you lower the res it will look a lot better.