Bug Report FPS Trashed [RESOLVED]

[EposVox]

I updated to 19.0.2 (64-bit) to find that the framerate of my main Twitch scene collection/profile is just totally wrecked somehow.

I have an i7-6900k and have never had a hiccup streaming 60FPS, but even the preview framerate counter is currently bouncing between 35.96 and 45 fps. Typically locking to 29.96 FPS, regardless of the scene. My image slideshows are stuttery AF, as is my webcam view, desktop, etc. About a second of fluid movement, freeze, movement, freeze, etc.

Here's a test log.

Here's a sample recording showing the frame drops.

This is completely unusable right now.

 

[Lain]

That log is incomplete -- if you still have the program open after replicating your problem, please close it, restart it, then upload and link the last log file instead.

With exception to the AMD encoder, none of the capture methods, encoders, or rendering changed in the 19. The primary thing that did change however was the media source, which you don't even appear to use at all according to that log file.

When I worked on 19, in terms of big changes, I first worked on the media source, then worked on the auto-config wizard, then the stats dialog, then other minor fixes. So I can't help but feel that there's something else going on here unrelated to the update. In your log file you have a very large number of scenes where I can't help but suspect you should probably be using scene collections for instead in many cases.

Again, encoders other than the AMD encoder did not change (and you use an NVIDIA card), captures did not change (the only thing that changed was a fix for game capture that only applies to the windows 10 creator's update), and rendering did not change.

So basically there would have to be something else going on here unrelated to the patch itself -- as much as you might first be inclined to assume it, every single time I release a patch I'll inevitably get posts saying "new patch broke [this]!" when I did not in fact change whatever they're having problems with. It's inevitable and happens every patch.

 

[Lain]

There are two things that happened somewhat around the release that somewhat coincided but were unrelated to the OBS update:

1.) Avast/AVG released an update, and in it they have a new "Game Mode" feature which must be disabled, otherwise it will negatively affect performance in OBS.

2.) Microsoft's new "Creator's Update" also coincidentally has a new "Game Mode" feature that will greatly reduce OBS' performance. Do not use it.

If that's not it, then get me that complete log and we'll see what else is going on.

 

[EposVox]

Haha no, these are all scenes divided up and nested and such to be used within my Twitch layout. I assure you I use Scene Collections quite heavily.
Almost all except a few "test" scenes are necessary. I've never had my bulk of scenes cause issue before so I had not thought to get rid of any. Makes it more difficult to keep testing if I'm limited.

BUT I did fix the issue, apologies - though I want to make a note in case it's relevant. Nevermind this was temporary...
I had a PCIe capture card added as a video capture device source that is no longer present in my system. Removing one of the scenes with it (though it was present in multiple other scenes) seems to have fixed it. This was not a problem for it any other time in the past month or two while I've had the card out of my system prior to the update, but that seems to have fixed it.

Here's the log before the initial "fix".

Well, removing one of those scenes shot the framerate back up to 59.94 but upon re-opening OBS it is back to random numbers.
I went through and removed all instances of not-present sources and extraneous scenes that I could, but that didn't make a difference a second time. Here's a log after that.

Here's (hopefully) a log of it working for a moment. I discovered that a USB capture card had become unplugged as well. As with the PCIe card, instead of removing the source, I simply closed OBS, plugged it in, reloaded OBS and things started working. Made a brief 60fps recording.
--
I've now combed through and removed every extraneous scene, muted out source, non-present device source left in my scene collection and trimmed it as far as I can go (way slimmer than was working just last week) and it's still jittery framerate central whenever I open OBS. Here's my most recent log after everything.
---
And now, 3 times opening in a row it seems to be fine. I have no clue what's going on. Here's a new log.

Gunna go ahead and post this so I can reboot. If it doesn't do it anymore after rebooting, I guess I'll close the thread for now. Can't really say I understand the inconsistency.

Thanks for your time. Your software is a godsend that I rely on for my day to day professional and streaming work, which is why I get so freaked when it doesn't work. Hopefully I can just close this in a sec.

 

[R1CH]

You may want to check for hardware issues like overheating, it's possible your system might be throttling itself from the behavior you describe.

 

[EposVox]

Reboot and 3 new launches and seems to be fine. No clue why it happened - which bugs me - but I guess it's fixed.

Keep up the good work on updates. I keep having to update my 2017 course scripts to incorporate new features before I launch.

EDIT: Re:R1CH HW temps are all fine, load is in the single digits % range.

 

[Lain]

Okay, just checking with the scene setup, it definitely wasn't that after all anyway. And there we go, one of those log files provided some useful information that showed your problem. And this certainly is strange:

12:51:15.876: Output 'adv_file_output': Number of lagged frames due to rendering lag/stalls: 549 (33.6%)

That's your problem, although that's definitely an unusual thing to see out of NVENC. Now here's the key important thing: NVENC definitely wasn't changed in the update at all, and we didn't change any of the dependencies for NVENC -- we use the same exact binaries to use NVENC as we did in 18 (it's used via FFmpeg libraries, and we didn't update them), and we didn't change any of the configuration code. We almost did change configuration, but we decided not to, and left NVENC as-is, unchanged from 18.

So something else must be going on here. Have you tried experimenting with for example a temporary blank scene collection with just a webcam or something to see if encoding is affected there? Or different encoding settings perhaps? Something else must have happened to trigger this to occur, and I can't help but feel it definitely couldn't have been the update because you're using nothing that we really changed at all.

 

[EposVox]

Well that's the thing - the frame drops were happening nonstop during the preview with no encoding happening at all. (x264 stream and nvenc record setting, btw.) Given my past issue with Nvenc that we never found a solution for, I would've ignored it if it was just a recording issue. But even when I wasn't encoding it still happened.
And yesterday I recorded with 19.0.0 or 19.0.1 Nvenc lossless and had no troubles with a different profile/scene collection. Dunno.

 

[OG See OH Zee]

I'm probably guessing about this, but since Windows 10 launched @Jim that it can cause background programs to slow down more than in previous OS's when GPU is under load, regardless of encoder. I don't think this is an OBS thing but it's more of Microsoft having this quirk. Some games that use a lot of GPU power don't slow down OBS but others have this quirk. Again this is just a guess but I haven't thoroughly tested this on older OS's since I don't intend to downgrade at all just to replicate it. Currently I run a GTX 1060 6GB since last holidays and being forced to reduce GPU loads by reducing settings and capping the framerate just to record in 60fps is jarring.

EDIT: Some users such as Fenrir are in the minority but again I'm thinking this is Microsoft's end since I don't have frame dips from OBS in Ubuntu when in the background even at full loads (tried Rust on max settings for example and no issues in-game or in OBS Studio with NVENC) or even older OSs. I should have posted the video and the logfile that has it but I didn't have that in mind and I deleted Ubuntu shortly afterwards.

 

[EposVox]

There were no games running in my test, heh. Literally just OBS and Chrome.

 

[OG See OH Zee]

A little update from my last post but I decided to record without any scenes just to see what's the deal, with no audio devices selected, and using NVENC, even downscaled the resolution from 1920x1080 to 852x480 w/bilinear filtering and still had this kind of result below based on the log I posted. This was when I recorded PUBG on ultra at 120% screen scale just to see how it goes (again no scenes at all).

15:48:41.169: Output 'simple_file_output': Number of lagged frames due to rendering lag/stalls: 146 (2.2%)

It's definitely something up here and I know it's not on OBS's side.

Log file in question:
https://gist.github.com/ef872524e19eb4af22167259d81a9d3f

 

[Lain]

Rendering lag is a completely separate issue -- EposVox's issue is encoding lag. Rendering lag is typically when OBS and a game are competing for GPU (which would make sense with PUBG on ultra), or one of your sources is taking too long to render. Epos' is due to the encoder stalling for some reason, so completely different type of frame loss.