Question / Help Game lags while I play it but output is completely fine

[Mr. Mister]

So for the past couple of hours I've been trying to figure out how to fix my problem but can't find anything. My problem is that I while my obs is open and recording, my virtual boy emulator and other games tend to begin to lag. They're all fine and have great fps when obs is closed.

The output is also fine. The quality is exactly as it should be and has zero problems.

Could this potentially be a problem with my PC? If so, I got an Intel(R) Xeon(R) W3565 @ 3.20 GHz processor and NVIDIA Quadro 2000 Graphics card. I know these aren't great and I don't know if that might be the problem.

Here is also a log of my OBS: https://obsproject.com/logs/d7DsQleCIe2ekl-z

 

[carlmmii]

Every recording attempt is showing 30-40% frames lost due to rendering lag, which means your GPU can't keep up with rendering frames in OBS.

I'm not familiar too much with the quadro line, but just a quick search puts it right around GT240/GTS250 as far as capability for what it's being used for. That's not great.

What's your GPU usage when running OBS vs when just running the game?

 

[Mr. Mister]

Every recording attempt is showing 30-40% frames lost due to rendering lag, which means your GPU can't keep up with rendering frames in OBS.

I'm not familiar too much with the quadro line, but just a quick search puts it right around GT240/GTS250 as far as capability for what it's being used for. That's not great.

What's your GPU usage when running OBS vs when just running the game?

I'm not sure how to check because I don't know a lot about computers. I tried looking up how to check my GPU but found nothing. How would I be able to check my GPU on Windows 7? (Yes I have Windows 7, I got my PC for free from my Dad's work since they weren't using it and they didn't bother to update it)

If it helps, my Driver Model is WDDM 1.1

 

[carlmmii]

You should be able to use GPU-Z or something like Rivatuner/Afterburner.

 

[Mr. Mister]

You should be able to use GPU-Z or something like Rivatuner/Afterburner.

I just got GPU-Z. What specific section should I look at when I run the game and OBS?

Here are a few photos that might help.
One of them is the main page. Another is the sensors tab with the game on but not OBS. And the last one is a picture of the game on with OBS also recording.

 

[carlmmii]

Based on the 3rd image, your GPU isn't even breaking a sweat. <50% usage, 55c, clock speeds not even max'd. So it's not a matter of overworking the GPU.

What does worry me though is that it's operating at PCIe 1.1 speeds. Not sure if this would be enough of a bottleneck to cause what you're seeing, but considering the GPU supports PCIe 2.0 operation, if you can get your motherboard to flip to 2.0 that would double the available bandwidth.

I realize that's a long shot based on how you came across this computer, and I'm not even sure if this would be something that would even be reported as rendering lag.

From what I can tell, the very first recording you did had absolutely no lagged frames, but it appears that was just webcam capture, correct? And then all the lagged frame recordings are from the scene with display capture.

Is it possible to use window capture instead of display capture? If that hook works, it would require a lot less bandwidth than sending the whole framebuffer over the PCI bus.

 

[Mr. Mister]

I just set OBS to Window Capture but it didn't show the emulator and instead a black screen. I looked up how to fix it and now everything is running perfectly. Thanks so much for your help.