Games Stuttering during Playback

[boss gaivatron]

Current system MacBook Pro M4 Max.

I am attempting to record directly from my mac using MacOS Screen capture. Same issue for multiple games. I tried with BG3 and Streets of Rage 4

Settings currently being used:
Source: MacOs Screen Capture (I tried display and app capture same result)
Output, Output mode Advanced (Settings not mentioned, did not touch)
-Recording format: MKV
-AppleVT HEVC Hardware Encoder
-Rescale disabled
-rate control CBR
-Bitrate 16000kbps
-keyframe 2s
-Profile main
-unchecked b frames
Advanced:
-Disable Vsync ( I have this disabled in all my games anyway)

If anyone needs anything else to help me with this issue, I can provide that, thank you in advance.

 

[MysticalOS]

if you mean the actual playback captured choppy. I had something similar happen and after extensive testing it turned out game mode starves obs encoders. disabling game mode fixed all capture issues.

basically what I found was game mode does what it's designed to do, it starves other applications of resources to keep game running as smoothly as possible, and that INCLUDES OBS recording. this is why when playing the game that's smooth as butter but recording comes out really bad.

this doesn't always happen of course, if you're running game where you're managing to lock your framerate without needing max resources it won't starve encoder. But if you so much as dip ONE frame below your fps cap, the recording in OBS gets tanked to make up that one frame. not even kidding

I did tests with a game where i capped framerate at 60. and as long as I was at 60fps in game obs was fine. if i so much as dipped to 59 in game, that part in video would stutter every time. cause immediately game mode took from OBS to get that 1 frame back. once i turned game mode off and reran same tests. now if i dropped below 60, obs was unaffected by this.

it's kinda funny really cause in game i tested, (WoW) the frame drops were not cause of OBS what so ever. just wows engine being cpu bound so the frame drops occuring were not result of not enough cpu or gpu resources going to wow, but rather wow not utilizing resources it already had effectively. so the resources it took from OBS had NO BENEFIT what so ever, just hurt obs massively. I've since learned in reality game mode in macOS is not very smart in regards to whether it NEEDS to to starve other applications or not. It has no context of WHY game is under performing and simply always assumes it's cause game needs more resources.

anyways, TL/DR, turn off game mode and try again. It may be same behavior i noticed.

In fact, the OBS team should add an option to auto toggle game mode off similar to how it does with vsync. I think that'd be of huge benefit to all mac users, since I suspect it's affecting a LOT of mac recordings and streams without user knowing. Quite simply, it should never be enabled when using OBS at all since it only works against OBS and any user choosing to use OBS on same machine they're gaming on would want OBS to get priority resources, even over the game in most cases, not other way around.