Question / Help Framerate drops in recording/preview only (Recording Res. Evil 2)

[Unconquered]

Hey,

So I posted another thread about this a couple days ago, but I've changed a lot of my settings around since then, and while I seem to have minimized a LOT of the framerate drops, I'm still getting some hefty ones at certain points.

My hardware is:
i7-6700k
GTX 1070 8GB
16GB Ram
Recording onto HDD (non-negotiable for me at this point in time)

My OBS settings are:
NVENC H.264
Rate Control: CQP
CQP: 15
Preset: High Quality
Profile: High
Level: Auto
Use 2 pass encoding
B-Frames: 2

Other Settings:
V-sync Enabled
Locked 60FPS in game
Game Bar/DVR Off
CPU Set to Minimum State 100%
No overclocking on GPU, reaching peaks of 1987MHZ Core Clock, 4007MHZ Memory Clock
Memory Usage Peak: 3883 MB
Peak GPU Temp: 71º (Although seems to have ran more steadily at around 67º)
Game Settings are only taking up 3.2GB of memory according to the in game settings

The drops, I've noticed, are much less random than in my last post, and interestingly enough, I revisited a lot of the same places in game where I was getting framerate drops in my last one, and the framerate was consistently 60 in those areas. When I say they are far less random in this new one, I mean I went to the same room twice and both times it occurred while in that area of the game - however, these framerate drops were only present in the preview and recording, not at all while playing.

I'm including the log for this recording as well, where it says that an astonishingly low 2/127283 (0.0%) frames were dropped due to encoding lag, so I feel there's absolutely no possible way that is related or an accurate representation of how many frames were dropped during these times.

I know NVENC is not the best encoder, but for some reason my CPU really, REALLY hates x264. Like even on the least passable of bitrates/CRF settings, it seems to hog all of my computers resources.

I'm not some huge YouTuber, but I really do want to be able to upload quality videos, and I really do appreciate any and all suggestions you guys can give. I'm sorry if this seems like a double post in any way, but I wanted to re-post with updates to all that I've addressed, and seeing as the problem seems to have changed in it's behavior. In addition, if there's some higher power of OBS that I can contact for support on this issue, if it's baffling to all of you as it has been me, I would love to know how to go about that.

Thank you all in advance for any help you can offer.

 

[Narcogen]

00:24:58.252: Video stopped, number of skipped frames due to encoding lag: 2/127283 (0.0%)

Is your problem a framerate drop in the video, or in the game? Because this logfile shows no appreciable stutter, and your settings look pretty good.

 

[Unconquered]

@Narcogen

Right? That's what has me so confused.

No, my FPS in game has been a solid 60. When playing I don't see any notable FPS drops, maybe one frame here or there on a quick turn, but the drops in my actual videos are about 10-15 second long periods of everything being choppy and slowed down, it looks like it's dropped to between 15-30 FPS for these periods, and then suddenly restores to normal.

I went onto the Discord support to get some help, was told to reinstall my Drivers, I'm still struggling to figure that out though. Really wanted to avoid using DDU as I read these warnings about malware that might lock my computer up if I try to start in safe mode, and I only use Windows Defender, so I'm not feeling all that confident about it. But that's a whole other issue lol

 

[kalhamm3r]

Hey there! just wanted to drop in to let you know I am having the EXACT same issue in resident evil 2. I never get any frames dropped or anything in my logs (or next to zero). But when I go back to check out the video, my video goes from a clean 60FPS down to 30FPS seemingly at random. I also experience NO FRAME DROPS in game. MOST of the time the video is a solid 60 with minimal stuttering and looks great, but then there will be times when it drops to exactly 30FPS for a while without any sort of warning or reflection of this in the program / log and then recovers back to 60FPS. I however was recording with x264 (low cpu preset) directly to a HDD as well. It was NOT the same drive as the game I was playing. It's very odd. It seems like this might be something the game is doing but who knows. Hopefully someone can look into it as it seems like a bug or something odd that the game engine is doing.

My specs are Ryzen 2600, 16GB DDR4 3000, RX580 8GB, 850Watt PSU, Win 10.

 

[Unconquered]

@kalhamm3r

Thanks for sharing! Interesting to know that someone else is experiencing this as well, and while I haven't used the x264 for it, I have tried both CBR and CQP for NVENC and it's present in both, knowing it's there in x264 is interesting. And yeah, when I'm recording Osu! or Overwatch, getting none of these drops as far as I can tell.. mind you I've only done one of each and they weren't very long, but it doesn't take a long time for it to happen in RE2.

Currently running a full scan with BitDefender to make sure nothing funky is going on, and then going to do a full reinstall of my gpu drivers to see if that alleviates the situation at all, will report back and let you know!

Edit: Just finished scans with both Malwarebytes and BitDefender and I'm totally clean, so viruses/malware/etc. aren't the cause of my issue. I also decided to run Intel Processor Diagnostic Tool just to make sure that was running well, and passed with no issues whatsoever. Going to re-install my drivers next.

Edit 2: Unfortunately, clean install of graphics drivers did not fix the issue D:

Edit 3: Becoming quite frustrated by this whole issue. Are there any comparable recording tools I could try to see if the problem only exists in OBS?

 

[kalhamm3r]

Yes, you could try and use FRAPS to see if that resolves it. That's what I was going to do. Also you have a GTX 1070, so you could also try and use SHADOWPLAY. I am going to try and use fraps to see if it's just the OBS software as well. Lets both report back if you would please. I just got my GTX 1070 in the mail w000t.

 

[Unconquered]

I don't like Shadowplay as much, as I can't address things like Gamma in the recording. For some games it's not an issue, but when I tried to do Resident Evil videos using it, they came out far too dark, and I'm not using any post recording software to edit, so I don't have the option to change gamma there either. Having said that, I did try a couple of RE2 recordings just to see if the framerate issue persisted, and it didn't seem to. Although, again, it was very dark and I may very well not have been able to see any small dips.

I will give FRAPS a shot and see if it works.

 

[kalhamm3r]

I just got my Gigabyte 1070 windforce up and running, and damn am I in love! (got it for 300$). That being said, I am going to give some shadowplay a run tonight and see what's up. Let me know if you have any luck with fraps.

 

[Unconquered]

@kalhamm3r

I just did another test and realized something, and this may be playing a factor, although I'll have to test it before I know for sure...

My card is supposed to run the GPU clock at 1771MHZ when boosted (again I'm running no user designated overclock, that's just it's GPU boost), however, when recording and playing, I'm seeing it get as high as 1987MHZ, and while it's not causing anything like frame drops or artifacting in game, I'm wondering if it's perhaps causing some instability or throttling, causing the video to have issue rendering in OBS.

I'm going to try underclocking the card by 220 MHZ and see if that resolves the situation.

Edit: I am first asking on the NVIDIA forums about whether or not it's safe to do this. I am wildly inexperienced in terms of over/underclocking, if anyone here knows the answer too that would be helpful :)

Edit2: lol Nope my ignorance on the issue has been explained to me, that should not by any means be the issue. OK. Well I'm going to try rolling back to an earlier driver on the recommendation of someone from the Nvidia forums and see if that helps.

Edit3: Made a longer Overwatch video to test things out, and I did in fact end up getting some lag on there as well. The log for that shows 0 dropped frames. I monitored my Utilization through HWMonitor while recording, and noticed no huge spikes during the lag in any of the utilizations. Weirdly though I also got game lag while playing Overwatch, which hasn't happened at all while playing Resident Evil 2.

 

[Unconquered]

So clearly it's not JUST RE2 for me, it's all games. I don't really understand why this is happening lol. All of my hardware is operating within reasonable ranges, nothing is nearing high temps, and the games themselves don't need to be lagging for the lag to appear in the preview+final recording.

I even installed the Beta version with the increased Nvenc functionality to see if that would help, but it's still producing the same result.

Is there any chance that because I'm running OBS on a secondary monitor with preview that this is happening? That seems like a bizarre thing to ask but I've found a couple of other threads about it, and I'm about to give a shot to some of the suggestions. I did run GPU-Z to see if everything checked out in my Bus Interface, and it does, so I'm really at a loss. I'm gettin close to just giving up on recording things altogether lmao, spent 30 of the last 72 hours troubleshooting and nothing seems to work :(

Edit: This is the list of suggestions for the 2 monitors potentially causing issues..

1. Plug both monitors into the same output source (video card or motherboard).
2. Set both monitors to the same refresh rate.
3. Set your OBS Studio FPS to either 30 or 60 (numbers that evenly divide into 60).
4. Limit your capture framerate to 30 or 60.
5. If you're capturing a game, cap your game's FPS to 60.
6. Turn on V-Sync (or some variant like adaptive V-Sync or G-Sync).
7. Minimize OBS Studio.
8. Disable the OBS Studio preview.
9. Put OBS Studio on the same monitor as what you're capturing.

Edit 2: Unfortunately none of those things worked

 

[Narcogen]

I would upload some more logfiles. You've only posted one and it seems like you've changed a lot of things.

 

[Unconquered]

@Narcogen

Happy to, but I've been checking them after each run through. They all show either no dropped frames, or a very negligible amount.. I really think I've exhausted all of the options at this point and there's just no way to make it work on my computer

 

[Narcogen]

The only thing I can think of would be slow media... but I would have thought that would also be logged as missed frames, but maybe it isn't?

If you had a different volume to test writing to? Have you run tools like BlackMagic Speed Test?

 

[Unconquered]

Thanks for the response,

I'm not sure what you mean by slow media...
I haven't tried that, what's the official site for it? I will say my disk's utilization is extraordinarily low while recording. There are occasional spikes, but they haven't lined up with frame drops

Edit: Found it lol, kept only finding Mac version for some reason, but got it now.

 

[Narcogen]

I mean that it is possible the skips end up in the file because your D: drive can't keep up with the writes. But you aren't recording files that are that large...

03:30:21.750: ==== Recording Start ===============================================
03:30:21.750: [ffmpeg muxer: 'adv_file_output'] Writing file 'D:/OBS/OBS Recordings/2019-01-31 03-30-21.flv'...
03:31:23.820: [ffmpeg muxer: 'adv_file_output'] Output of file 'D:/OBS/OBS Recordings/2019-01-31 03-30-21.flv' stopped
03:31:23.820: Output 'adv_file_output': stopping
03:31:23.820: Output 'adv_file_output': Total frames output: 3710
03:31:23.820: Output 'adv_file_output': Total drawn frames: 3725
03:31:23.820: ==== Recording Stop ================================================


NVENC reports performance differently and I'm not as familiar with its issues.

The above session was only a minute long-- does it contain skipped frames or stutters?

 

[Unconquered]

Yes, they started immediately, so I knew it wasn't working and stopped it.

The files can get pretty big, I aim to record in CQP 15, but I've been playing around with things just to see if anything alleviates it.

But I mean the issue also just shows up in the preview when the recordings not even started (albeit far more infrequently), Exactly the same type of frame drops as when I'm recording, and when I'm recording this drop coincides perfectly and identically to what's in the final video.. If it WAS the hard drive, then it wouldn't make any sense for it to be doing it in the preview when nothing's recording, would it?

Like I'm starting to feel like something in my system is screwing with it when that happens, and I just can't think of what. The only apps open are OBS and the game. Could Windows Defender be messing with it in the background?

 

[Narcogen]

Whatever is causing it does not appear to be showing up in the logs, so that makes me think it is something outside of OBS itself.

 

[Unconquered]

@Narcogen

Yeah it's starting to seem that way..

How would one go about 100% uninstalling OBS so I could try a redownload, like my settings and everything wiped

 

[koala]

To completely remove all traces of OBS,
- uninstall all 3rd party OBS plugins you might have installed
- uninstall OBS
- open Windows explorer and delete the directory "C:\Program Files (x86)\obs-studio". This will remove any remaining plugins you forgot to uninstall.
- open Windows explorer and delete the directory %appdata%\obs-studio. This will remove all OBS settings and scenes which are preserved between uninstalls

 

[Unconquered]

Awesome, will try that, thank you