Question / Help FPS LOCKED AT 15

dakaaz

New Member
Hello, im using the lates obs, and my config is toshiba satellite s50 b 15, that is:
i7 5500u
r7 m260 2gb
8gb ram
1080p screen
Latest intel drivers, force installed
lates beta amd drivers
When i start recording, even my screen, it stays at 15 fps, dropping the bitrate, resolution or usin intel QS leaves me with 15 fps. I read that my webcam can be the issue, but its off, im not using it.
 
Do me a favour. Try to use x264 to record 720p at 30fps with 5000 bitrate and "ultrafast" CPU preset. Tell me if it still locks to 15fps.
 
Yeah... I figured as much... you're using a low-TDP CPU and you're maxing it out, so OBS can't render more than that amount of FPS.

Basically, recording with OBS is going to be a pain for you. Your CPU isn't allowed to draw more than ~15w (unless your manufacturer allowed 20W at the board which I doubt it did) and this includes as far as I know, the power that your iGPU is drawing, which is why Quicksync crapped out for you. I suggest using 720p 30fps ~5000 bitrate using quicksync encoder at its fastest compression (to mitigate power draw) and seeing if it lets you take the full 30fps, and I sincerely hope you're not planning on recording games being played on that laptop itself. It's not designed for such workloads; not even close.
 
I was planing on recording my screen. A friend with 4500U and a 840m was recording 60 fps 1366x768 quicksync while playing lol. Can it be that my drivers are broken in a way(force installing newer intel igpu driver)? Or is there really no way to use obs for monitor capture. camtasia 8 worked fine, but i got some artefacts with the intel QS encoder in camtasia.
 
well first, if his 4500U had 20W limit instead of 15W, that'd instantly be better... also his 840M will be rendering LoL, taking performance off of the CPU to do so.
 
i just played lol at 1080p and recorded it at 1080p 30 fps 10000 kbps using quicksynk preset best quality with cpu room to spare. But i can not screenrecord....
 
CPU room isn't your issue. It's TDP. For whatever reason, screen recording is killing your TDP.

TDP is how many watts the CPU is drawing. Even if your CPU was sitting at 100% it's not an indicator of how many watts it's using.

For example: at 3.9GHz with stock voltage on my CPU, I pull ~60W doing Intel XTU's stress test, or Throttlestop's benchmark. Alternately, I pull 70W rendering a video which was recorded with fast compression and a high bitrate. Alternately, I can pull 94W WHILE THROTTLING using Linpack's benchmark, on only 4 CPU cores.

All instances use 100% CPU load constantly. It's different instruction sets and whatnot. You also have to play your game + use the iGPU for quicksync. 15W is quite a little bit for it.

As for my earlier post about your friend, I didn't notice you had a dGPU as well. Maybe he wasn't using monitor capture as you discovered? All I know is, the fact that lowering your resolution/framerate/bitrate earlier to record improved OBS' framerate, that means that you were bottlenecking somewhere, and those ULV chips are weird. As I said, some OEMs limit their boards to 15W on a 17W chip. Some limit them to 17W. Some limit them to 20W, and the extra 3W goes a LONG way with those things.
 
No he was not, he wasusing game capture, like i tested. I can try to do a monitor capture later with his laptop.
So different cpu load task the cpu in a different way and they draw less or more power.
Two different cpus at the same lets say 2ghz and same architecture, but different power limits can perform in a different way? I am comming from a 4ghz phenom 965 so this POWER "LIMIT" is a new thing to me :D. I guess i will be using camtasia 8 for screen recording.
Also there is a bug for machines like mine with two gpus, one needs to specify QS for the integrated intel gpu and OBS for the gpu from which will be recorded.
 
What you have is a "ultra low voltage" processor. This means your CPU is rated for ~17W of power draw. Its rated "speed" is pointless if it hits a power limit. Different instruction sets and different scenarios can mean different power draw, as I explained, even though the CPU is running at 100% in each instance. If your motherboard was built to limit you to 15W and you perform tasks that exceed that 15W limit, your CPU will throttle aka slow down. If your limit was 20W, then your CPU could draw an extra 5W. The "rated TDP" is pointless on a processor. It's just an example of how much it'll draw in scenarios most users and gamers will use, and is also a guide for how much heat the heatsink must be prepared to dissipate.

My CPU is a 47W CPU but I can make it draw well over 80W at stock settings (if I adjust the power limits in my BIOS, which you cannot do). If I left my CPU at 47W (with 57W turbo power limit) then i would simply run out of power and my CPU would downclock itself in the more demanding workloads. For ULV chips which are designed to only draw 15W-17W of power, the difference between 15W and 20W is immense in what the CPU can handle at its maximum speed etc.

Those ultra low voltage chips are not designed to withstand very heavy loads. In fact, they're designed specifically to NOT be stressed with mild loads like video rendering/recording/streaming/CPU intensive gaming/etc. It's just that in the fight for thin and light with good battery life, people use the ULV chips and market them as more than they are.
 
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