Question / Help Game Smooth on Monitor, Choppy in OBS preview + recording: Elgato HD60 Pro

[TheHaggardNerd]

Hello,

Looking for some help in getting buttery smooth recordings through OBS if possible.

Log File Here: https://obsproject.com/logs/Hej5YD5C1RDkUhu1

System specs:

• Intel - Core i7-8700K 3.7GHz 6-Core Processor OC'd @ 4.3GHz
• Asus - Prime Z370-A ATX LGA1151 Motherboard
• G.Skill - Trident Z RGB 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR4-3600 Memory
• Samsung - 960 EVO 500GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive (x2 OS Drive/Recording Drive)
• Samsung - 860 EVO 500GB 2.5 Inch SATA III SSD (Premiere Pro Scratch Drive)
• Western Digital - Caviar Black 4TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (Storage)
• Asus - GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB OC STRIX GAMING Video Card

My recorded gameplay and preview window in OBS are both somewhat choppy and do not match the smoothness displayed on my monitor. I have used a bunch of different combinations of recording settings, both x264 and nvenc and I'm getting the same results. I use an Elgato HD60 Pro to pull my video from my gpu into OBS. I use the passthrough on the HD60 Pro to go to my monitor where I can see the game. When obs is open (doesn't even have to be recording) the preview window in OBS is somewhat choppy, whereas the passthrough feed is super smooth. From my experience, whatever I'm seeing in the preview window reflects what is being recorded.

To answer the question if it comes up: Why do I not just record direct from my GPU? The choppiness is actually worse when recording with a Game Capture source and there is noticeable screen tearing. I find that when i use the elgato card, it smooths out the frames a bit and fixes the tearing completely.

I've attempted recording through elgato's software and the recordings are quite a bit smoother, but unfortunately does not give me the flexibility that OBS does in customizing my scenes.

Short of completely trashing my current OBS profile and installing fresh, I've tried everything I can think of to help smooth out my recordings and have come up empty handed. Any advice or help you guys can offer would be much appreciated. I'll be happy to answer any questions or give any additional information as needed to help get this figured out. Thanks!

 

[icanplaystayshun]

Hey there, just wanted to let you know you're not alone. I think you have the same issue I have, I just call it micro-stuttering.

I capture my PS4 using an Elgato HD60 Pro and the pass-through goes into the TV. TV is fine, OBS preview shows me a constant stutter in the game capture (like every ~0.8 seconds).

I could not find any source for the issue, so I figured a clean install would do the trick. Well, after installation (Win10) I created a new scene in OBS with a new source and voilá - game preview was smooth - as far as the eye could tell. I was happy and imported my saved old scenes and boom! - stuttering was back. I blamed my old configuration, so I switched back to the mint non stuttering scene and added my scenes/sources by hand one by one again (overlays, images, you name it). At some point the capture started to stutter again. Not as badly as before, but noticeable. So I think it must be an OBS issues as
* there is not stutter when I try the Elgato streaming software (that I don't want to use)
* the stuttering is somehow influenced by the amount of sources/scenes - I don't consider myself a heavy user, just a few overlays and a webcam.

Hardware is only there for capturing. CPU is idle all the time (Ryzen 1700) and there is nothing installed except Win10 and OBS.

This is super frustrating. I stream less, as I don't want to torture my audience with a micro stutter gameplay. Spend a lot of money on decent capture hardware and now I'm stuck with some sort of a software issue. I love OBS and hope this issues gets resolved / pinpointed any time soon!

I might post my issue as well at some point, I am planning on releasing a video that shoes the issue, might be easier for people to see what I/we actually mean.

 

[BK-Morpheus]

The log shows no recording/streaming attempt.
If I would have to guess about the source of that problem:
Mixing high refreshrate monitor + non highrefreshrate monitor (or capture card) on Windows systems might cause this, but I don't know, if you are using more than 60Hz on the gaming monitor.
If so, you could just deactivate Freesync/G-Sync and set both monitors (or the main monitor + Elegato card) to 60Hz for testing.

It's also possible, that you allow your GPU to choke OBS, by not using a proper fps limit in your game (you need to leave at least 5-10% headroom on the GPU load for OBS to render fast enough).

 

[Narcogen]

You can always make new, blank profiles and scene collections for the purposes of testing.

Having multiple captures sources in scenes can cause bad performance; it's better to create separate scene collections for each game (presuming that a single streaming session is dedicated to a single game).

 

[GADAS]

Did you ever fix it?
i am also getting this issue where obs preview every 3-4 seconds looks a bit laggy and then smooths out and then laggy again. And recordings mimic that exactly.