Question / Help FPS drops and Buffers when streaming

[Cerebro]

Hi. Sorry if this has been posted before, but I tried solutions listed there but it didn't work.

Anyway, I was doing a dry run of my stream in preparation for me streaming regularly, when I discovered that I couldn't do 1080p streams at 2500kbps bitrate because not only was the stream insanely buffering and choppy, but my game (Heroes of the Storm) also crawled so much that my regular FPS was 25 and it even goes down to 1fps on engagements (in comparison, I have 60-70fps playing heroes without streaming).

So what I did was lower my resolution and bitrate, and while my fps improved (around 40-50 after the change) the stream was still buffering and choppy. I had no choice by to lower it even further by doing 480p having a 1000kbps bitrate and everything went almost normal, with occasional stream buffering.

Moving forward though, I don't think my potential viewers would like to only have 480p streams that even buffers, so I'd like to seek help on how to configure OBS studio to have a buffer-free stream.

For reference, my ISP has a 50mbps download and upload speed (it's usually 47mbps though for both, but i think that's more than enough) and my recent stream test log is right here: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/b5d6df1cd15128be76ead3e600d67107

Thanks in advance. :)

 

[Waistless]

• Output 'simple_stream': Number of skipped frames due to encoding lag: 203 (15.1%)

What this means is your CPU can't keep up with encoding. 720p60 is quite demanding to encode, even on the veryfast preset. Heroes of the Storm also runs on a very cpu-intensive engine so combining that means your cpu struggles.

I would suggest either streaming at 720p 30fps, or change to Hardware encoding (AMD VCE) and see how that goes. Note that you'll need to update to latest OBS studio to use AMD encoding.

Also check there aren't any stray processes using a ton of CPU%, look in task manger > processes make sure your game and OBS are the only 2 things using a significant amount.

 

[Cerebro]

Thanks for the reply Waistless, really appreciate it.

Sorry if I'm a bit of a noob on these things, but when you said "Hardware Encoding", you mean the "Encoder" textbox under the "Streaming" section on the "Output" tab, right? If yes, then I'm not sure why I only have "Software (x264) available. Is there something I can do so enable the other selections?

I also changed the Output (scaled resolution) to 720p and Common FPS Value to 30, but it also was too choppy and laggy so I had to resort to 480p, 30FPS with 1000 bitrate, and while it worked, the stream still had buffering moments, not to mention the resolution was bad.

Also, when I tested the stream only 3 applications were open: Heroes, OBS Studio, and Google Chrome (to check the stream). I usually close unwanted tasks using the Task Manager.

 

[Waistless]

My bad, VCE is only supported in the 7000+ AMD GPUs. Only other thing I can think of is limiting FPS in HoTS to 60 (turn vsync on). Your CPU is decent though so I'm surprised you can't do a little better on that system.

 

[Cerebro]

I could try that, hopefully that will fix my issues with Heroes.

My main concern though is the choppiness of the stream as it buffers frequently and even when it doesn't, it looks like a slideshow (which i think is caused by low FPS). To find out if Heroes was the one causing it, I tried another stream playing Guild Wars 2. The frame drop wasn't as drastic in game as Heroes (maybe around 10fps drop so I had around 30-60fps which is decent for an MMO), but the stream was suffering because of the low resolution (480p) and bitrate (1000kbps), so I increased it to 2500kbps at 720p, and then the problems re-emerged.

The logs or I probably haven't mentioned this yet, but my OS is Windows 10 Anniversary Update which I think has problems with OBS if the Sticky is still accurate today. Is it indeed the case even if my stream is fine at low bitrate and resolution, and if it is, what solutions can I do to have a higher resolution stream with no buffering/framedrops/skipped frames?

 

[Cerebro]

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