Question / Help frame lag when streaming?

[qwerty]

Hey, I'm new to streaming and someone recommended me OBS after I tried xsplit. In both programs I end up having some really bad frame lag in game and it's pretty much unplayable for me.

I use the 64-bit version of OBS. My PC specs:
CPU: intel i7-3770K @ 3.50 GHz
RAM: 8GB
GPU: nvidia geforce gtx 670

Anyone know why I'm having fps lag and how to get rid of it?

 

[Lain]

well your computer is great so you shouldn't have problems. if you are using monitor capture, you need to disable aero to prevent lag (and to capture at a reasonable rate). if you are using window capture, try with both aero enabled and disabled and see if there's any difference. or, are you playing with dxtory? I've heard some people using dxtory get in-game lag like that, though I haven't been able to fully confirm.

if those things don't work, try messing with v-sync being on or off in your game, and see if that changes anything. you have a great computer so you shouldn't be getting any in-game lag.

 

[qwerty]

Hey, thanks for the fast reply.

I tried both monitor capture and setting the game itself as source. I have aero disabled, classic theme doesn't really support it so I've never had it on. I don't have dxtory. I tried switching vsync on and off like you said but no difference.

If anyone has any other ideas I could try I'd appreciate it.
My CPU is running at factory settings, I've never tried to overclock it or anything. Do you think this would help?

 

[Lain]

your CPU is great at factory settings. it shouldn't cause any problems. out of curiosity, what game are you playing?

 

[Lain]

also, another idea would be to turn down your FPS in video settings a bit, see if that changes anything. sometimes capturing too fast can have adverse affects with monitor capture.

 

[qwerty]

I tried lots of quality options, 20 fps and low resolution as well as high quality but it makes no difference. The game I'm trying to stream is Team Fortress 2, but I also tried Dota 2 with the same results.

 

[Lain]

Hm, this is most unusual. What version of windows are you on? Have you run windows update recently? Are you using the latest video drivers? Also, try the 32bit version.

I have TF2 as well and don't have any problems at all, and my computer system is fairly identical. I'm not sure what's going on here. Very strange. Could you post a log? If you used the installer, you can access your logs through the start menu installation folder, or if using binaries, you can access it by typing %AppData%/OBS/logs into start/run

 

[qwerty]

I'm on windows 7, updates are downloaded and installed automatically but I believe last update was about 2-3 weeks ago. I recently updated the video drivers to the latest version. I tried the 32 bit version, but I still get the jitter from unstable fps.

Here is one of the log files:

Open Broadcaster Software v0.411a - 64bit (　^ω^)
-------------------------------
CPU Name: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770K CPU @ 3.50GHz
CPU Speed: 3500MHz
Physical Memory: 8147MB Total, 6261MB Free
stepping id: 9, model 10, family 6, type 0, extmodel 1, extfamily 0
=====Stream Start=====================================================================
Base resolution: 1920x1080
Output resolution: 1280x720
------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------
Adapter 1
Video Adapter: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670
Video Adapeter Dedicated Video Memory: 2091581440
Video Adapeter Shared System Memory: 2147479552
Loading up D3D10...
------------------------------------------
Using auxilary audio input: Microphone (Realtek High Definition Audio)
------------------------------------------
Audio Encoding: AAC
bitrate: 128
------------------------------------------
Video Encoding: x264
fps: 20
width: 1280, height: 720
quality: 8
preset: veryfast
i444: no
max bitrate: 1000
buffer size: 1000
------------------------------------------
Total frames rendered: 9722, number of frames that lagged: 479 (4.93%) (it's okay for some frames to lag)
=====Stream End=======================================================================

Profiler results:

==============================================================
frame - [100%] [avg time: 26.169 ms] [avg calls per frame: 1] [children: 97.7%] [unaccounted: 2.3%]
| scene->Preprocess - [50.4%] [avg time: 13.195 ms] [avg calls per frame: 1]
| video encoding and uploading - [47.3%] [avg time: 12.373 ms] [avg calls per frame: 1] [children: 43.5%] [unaccounted: 3.79%]
| | CopyResource - [39.8%] [avg time: 10.403 ms] [avg calls per frame: 0]
| | conversion to 4:2:0 - [3.74%] [avg time: 0.979 ms] [avg calls per frame: 0]
==============================================================

 

[Lain]

thank you. hm, everything seems to be in order (as a half life scientist once said) ..I'll do some more testing to see if I can't replicate it or something. very weird.

 

[qwerty]

Alright, thanks so much for your help. I will keep trying to fiddle with settings and different games.

 

[R1CH]

Did you try the 32 bit version?

 

[Lain]

If you don't manage to find any way to fix this issue, just so you know I'm probably going to implement native game capturing sooner rather than later to prevent this sort of thing from occuring.

 

[qwerty]

I was testing some monitor settings and I noticed that there's barely any difference in fps if I set my monitor to 60Hz refresh rate whilst streaming, as opposed to the dramatic drop I get when my monitor is set to 120Hz as it usually is.

 

[Lain]

is this multiplayer lag? do you only get this when streaming, not in say preview? if so, turn down your "send buffer size" in advanced settings. (not the buffer size in encoding, but the "send buffer size" in advanced, just for clarity)

 

[qwerty]

it happens in preview as well as when actually streaming, and setting buffer size to lowest still doesn't make any difference.

 

[qwerty]

It seems to be a bit better now I just noticed, when I make sure I close processes like flash player and any music players and then start streaming. It's still very jittery and pretty much unplayable at any serious level (there is a slight lag on mouse input as well) but it looks a bit better. Makes me think it's my computer that isn't able to handle it for some reason.

 

[Aelfric]

Do you have any kind of "tune up utilities" kinda registry and system managing program installed? Those programs may force other cpu intensive objects to limit their thread usage on cpu or lower their priority to make cpu less hot and stuff. You might wanna check those those things out from task manager if necessary. It seems to me like obs cannot use your cpu threads at it's full capacity. The Cpu you use has 8 threads on 4 cores, there should be no way avarage quality streaming make your games unplayable.

 

[qwerty]

I'm not sure what kind of programs you mean, but I usually make sure I have as few processes running as possible when I'm playing.