Encountering rendering lag when I really shouldn't?

[Samifying]

A bit of a special one here... Seemingly over night OBS started behaving a bit weird.

Just having OBS open (not even recording or streaming) it's telling me I'm getting rendering lag. It's not consistent but more like a rendering lag spike that happens every 5-10 seconds or so. While actually recording, the dropped frames due to rendering lag and encoding lag are the same amount.

This lag might seem small at 0.5% but for someone who really wants a smooth stream / recording I can't accept this. If it drops below 60fps multiple times per minute it's just not good enough... Specially with the Hardware I have.

[CPU: AMD Ryzen 5900x // GPU: MSI Suprim x 3090]


Analyzing the "current session" log file after recording for a bit tells me this:

The problem with this is that it's simply not true. OBS at maximum is using 6-7% of my AMD 5900x CPU and also only 25% of my MSI 3090 suprim x GPU.

^ ^ ^
This is while recording.

They are not overloaded and nowhere near hitting high levels. This makes me believe either my Hardware isn't giving enough attention to OBS or OBS isn't asking for enough attention from my clearly powerful hardware.

I'm confused and worried my GPU / CPU are confused / not being used to their fullest potential.

Please help... I at least want to know if its normal or not with my hardware to be experiencing this. Thank you!!

 

[Deleted member 121471]

1) Run OBS as administrator;

2) Disable Windows 10 "GameDVR" and enable "Game Mode";

3) Streamelements plugin is puking all over the log with errors, remove it and add the EL website links as browser sources instead;

4) In OBS settings --> Output, stick to NVENC, use "Quality" preset then disable "Lookahead" and "Psycho Visual Tuning".

This is the bare minimum recommended changes that cover the vast majority of problems with rendering and encoding. You still need to cap your frame rate if this is not enough.

Lastly, certain actions such as alt tabbing between applications, specially if they are in exclusive fullscreen mode, leads to a small amount of rendering lag that you can't do anything to prevent, aside from NOT doing said actions.

Having powerful hardware does not mean bottlenecks are no longer relevant, either due to incorrect configurations or understanding of how it works.

 

[Samifying]

Hey Volfield thank you so much for your answer,

I've disabled GameDVR now and Game Mode was already enabled.

I uninstalled every instance of OBS.LIVE from my computer and reinstalled a new fresh OBS. I then imported my scene collections from the old OBS over so I don't lose any work i did.

Also swapped to your recommended Output / Render settings.

This however hasn't fixed the problem it seems... With hardware like this I'd need to find out exactly what I'm doing wrong to have my PC struggle at rendering frames. There's no way a 3090 combined with a ryzen 5900x has more trouble rendering frames than my old pc.

I'll do another recording and upload the log to see if anything has changed with the fresh reinstall of OBS. If you see anything weird in the logs please let me know!! Thank you so much for your time.

(This time i ran OBS in administrator mode)

 

[Deleted member 121471]

Lookahead and Psycho Visual Tuning still need to be disabled, according to last log posted.

If you're recording, "CQP" rate control set to 16-23 (lower values = higher image quality at the cost of filesize) and saving the file to .mkv format is highly recommended.

Even a RTX 3090 can have rendering lag since that amazing performance, if uncapped, is being used to output more ingame FPS so you're still not leaving many resources left for OBS to composite your scenes.

 

[Samifying]

I see, that's my bad. Must have accidentally turned them on again. Nothing else thats suspicious?


It's just that you would think it would just use more of the GPU? With my CPU sitting at 7% usage and my GPU sitting at 20% usage while recording there should be so much more headroom for OBS to just ask for more resources right?

Is something not configured right? Is there anything I can do? D:

 

[Deleted member 121471]

What you could try is a clean scene collection, only add your game title and camera, nothing else, not even filters and test a recording, to check if it's still producing any lag.

GPU usage statistics are also misleading, as that depends on boost clocks. For example, my amd card will report higher usage on low boost clocks (say 400Mhz), making it seem OBS is pretty demanding but, once I start any game, clocks boost to their max and OBS GPU usage goes to single digits.

 

[Dymk]

Hi,
You can check my topic with decoding problem here- https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/brand-new-encoding-problem-web-media-extensions-update.142439/

Something changed between Windows and OBS- after this my OBS was using 3D engine to render video scenes. What I suggest you is to try disabling HW DECODING in each media scene and test it out, it helped in my case cuz 3D load went down a lot. I'm no expert tho and I'm using NVENC NEW.

PS. should task managed say that OBS is using VIDEO DECODE instead of 3D? I had this problem and after reinstalling OBS it's fixed aswell.

 

[soncekw]

i have no idea why i get it to becaus- ohhhh the malware i put on my device wait no but my cpu is running at 5% 1% on the OBS recorder
may as well be not running enough to get it to not lag