Question / Help Frame rate is cut in half / stutters every 10 minutes

[Lapppy]

I tried OBS MP 0.12.3 and seems to be no stuttering in my case (different from yours in terms of hardware).
Posted just in case you don't know that 0.12.3 is out.

cheers,
Dorin

Yeah, i'm running the latest 0.12.3 (OBS tells you if your version is out of date when you launch it).
It appears that 0.12.3 had a fix for certain stutters, but it didn't affect me.

Also i'm running the version that comes with the browser plugin. This adds an extra running process that uses up CPU even when the browser plugin isn't actually running... eww.
This isn't the cause for my issue however, because this happens even without the browser plugin.

Latest News:
1. Setting the frame rate to some crazy archaic value did not seem to help after some extended testing. Thankfully.
Keep in mind, that this fixed it for my laptop. OBS is still running at 60.017fps on my laptop.
2. Setting the power scheme to Balanced did not help either.

 

[paibox]

Lapppy, the stuttering/repeated frames issue you're talking about is most likely the one that has been around to some degree since the original OBS. Attempts have been made to investigate it, but the conclusion has mostly been that it's probably an issue caused by the way Windows and DirectX updates the screen.

Some attempts to combat the repeated frames issue has been made, but it unfortunately wrecked the general frame timing quite badly. Wasn't worth the other issues it caused.

I haven't seen you mention it so far, so try switching obs-studio over to OpenGL mode. This setting is at the very top in Settings->Video. It will cause a bit more GPU (and possibly CPU) load, but it might help the issue.

 

[Lapppy]

Lapppy, the stuttering/repeated frames issue you're talking about is most likely the one that has been around to some degree since the original OBS. Attempts have been made to investigate it, but the conclusion has mostly been that it's probably an issue caused by the way Windows and DirectX updates the screen.

Some attempts to combat the repeated frames issue has been made, but it unfortunately wrecked the general frame timing quite badly. Wasn't worth the other issues it caused.

I agree that it is the same issue, I recently tried OBS 0.657 and it had the same problems.
I also re-tried Bandicam and observed the issue with Bandicam as well. Normally it didn't happen during the tests I did with Bandicam, since it has a 10 minute time limit for recordings on the free version. In my most recent Bandicam test it happened at around the 9:30 mark.

So yes, i'm sure that my problem is caused by Windows and Direct X.

I'm interested in reading some of the information on this bug, i'll be looking on the forums here for some. Is there any discussion here? or was that all on IRC, etc?

I haven't seen you mention it so far, so try switching obs-studio over to OpenGL mode. This setting is at the very top in Settings->Video. It will cause a bit more GPU (and possibly CPU) load, but it might help the issue.

Will mess with this soon. I guess it means no more 60fps, so if that is the solution, I hope I can find a good balance between quality and stability of the capture.

 

[paibox]

The discussion about the issue mostly happened on IRC, the forum often isn't an environment conductive to very technical discussions. (Not saying that the forum isn't suited to its purpose, it usually is.)

The main problem seems to be that when Microsoft took the step to using DirectX to render (mostly) everything Windows, they likely ran into some issues, such as Windows trying to update themselves too often, and thus it sometimes rationalizes and decides that just maybe a window's backbuffer doesn't need to be updated all the time. It can sometimes be observed directly in games running in windowed mode as well. (Any frame rate counter may display 60, while the game appears to be running at 30 or so.)

We tried things like force flushing the D3D buffer and reducing the number of backbuffers to ensure that all frames got displayed, but it seemed to go completely ignored by DirectX (10) itself. With obs-studio and DirectX 11, we managed to force it to render all frames, but that came at the cost of erratic frame rates for asynchronous sources such as capture cards and webcams.

The reasoning behind handling it like this was most likely that people were likely to play games in fullscreen, which isn't part of the DWM (Desktop Window Manager), and if they wanted to watch movies they'd have hardware overlay surfaces (which also bypass the DWM), and because of that it wouldn't be much of an issue. Sadly attempting to use their new technology results in some hurdles to overcome for less conventional software developers.

OpenGL also bypasses the DWM, and thus isn't susceptible to these things, but it's also the reason why OpenGL applications can't be captured using Window Capture.

One thing to keep in mind when using obs-studio in OpenGL mode; Display Capture cannot be used efficiently in Windows 8 or 10 in this mode, it's somewhat workable in Windows 7 with Aero disabled, but still a lot of extra CPU load. It's possible that some sort of texture sharing through the Desktop Duplicator API could be supported at some point, but I don't believe that it's a planned feature.

 

[Lapppy]

Thanks for the explanation.

Recently tried using OpenGL, and it's honestly not usable with any capture method. It pretty much inhibits the performance of the whole computer (even without display capture).

So for now, it seems I am just going to have to live with it until automatic scene switching is added to OBS-MP. Then I can use multiple Window Capture sources as an effective capture method.

I very much hope that more efforts will go into solving this problem, and (more importantly) other stutter related problems in the future.

I never really thought about it until now, but I guess my primary method for recording and streaming in the meantime will actually be through my laptop. That's kind of funny since there are some people that think that if one wants to stream or record for Twitch/YouTube seriously, they need to use a desktop. Well I certainly don't think so. :)