GPU Rendering Lag & Encoder Overload

[SnewSnew]

Ok, I've been ripping my hair out over this for about a year, trying to sort it out on my own but at this point I'm down to just eyebrows and nose hairs, so I need some help.

My stream runs completely fine with whatever settings I choose, on whatever game I want to play, without anything showing up in my stats for Rendering or Encoding Lag...as long as I don't turn on my camera.

The moment I turn on my one face cam, both start to light up like a Christmas Tree, quickly spiking into the thousands and I eventually either need to turn the cam off completely, deal with the errors, or lower my settings practically to low / medium.

Because I'm apparently a glutton for pain, I started recently streaming in 2k as I was accepted into the beta, and what's strange is that there's no *increase* to the behavior. Everything is equally off in that what my viewers see will get a bit "choppy" for less than 30 seconds, then resolve itself. This ultimately ends up buffering the stream though, and before long there's a 45-90 second delay between what I'm doing and what they see, so I need to completely stop the stream and restart it. Stopping in this scenario generally takes 20-30 seconds as opposed to the usual 2-3.

As for steps I've taken to try to resolve this myself I've:

• Updated all my drivers
• Updated my BIOS
• Tried with HAGS turned on, and with it turned off
• Tried running with the NVENC H.264 Encoder and with the CPU x264 encoder
• Updated my encoder settings to match those provided by NVidia for my GPU (Watercooled RTX 3090)
• Cleaned up my OBS Scenes and Sources
• Reduced the resolution of my face cam
• Turned on / Enabled Windows BAR
• Confirmed my GPU is running on PCIe 4.0
• Ran MemTest86 with no issues
• Ran several stress tests on my GPU
• Changed which camera I'm using
• Completely wiped my OS and rebuilt my PC from scratch
• Reseated my GPU
• Removed the riser cable from my GPU and completely re-did my cooling runs so the GPU would be running directly to the motherboard
• Searched far and wide for literally any other answers short of making a deal with an Eldritch God to get this to work

I'm literally to the point where I'm wondering if my GPU has been cheating on the tests I've been making it take and I need to replace that, if there's something wrong at a fundamental level with my motherboard or CPU, and I just need to replace the whole things, etc. I'm even considering just getting a laptop so I can use a 2 PC setup and offload everything for OBS to that.

I've attached the most recent log where I experienced this issue, and was actively trying to troubleshoot while live. At around 18:05.49, I stopped the stream and started it again to clear the delay I mentioned above. That stream ended at 21:18, and is followed by a bunch of troubleshooting / cleanup I was trying to do the following day to resolve the issue for the future.

I just don't know anymore, and I can't seem to come up with any other ideas, so if anyone out there can help someone in desperate need of a solution, whether that's something on my PC, or a drink, I would GREATLY appreciate it. Sorry for the huge info dump, but I figure it might help with avoiding some of the initial troubleshooting steps I've already gone through.

 

[rockbottom]

There's a bunch of things in your set-up that I don't do but I think your next step should be to create a new Scene Collection with just (1) Scene/Source.

Test using a clean slate, some of the Scenes in the current collection are bugged with multiple Display, Game and/or Window captures & could be causing some of your rendering lag.

 

[prgmitchell]

Ok, I've been ripping my hair out over this for about a year, trying to sort it out on my own but at this point I'm down to just eyebrows and nose hairs, so I need some help.

My stream runs completely fine with whatever settings I choose, on whatever game I want to play, without anything showing up in my stats for Rendering or Encoding Lag...as long as I don't turn on my camera.

The moment I turn on my one face cam, both start to light up like a Christmas Tree, quickly spiking into the thousands and I eventually either need to turn the cam off completely, deal with the errors, or lower my settings practically to low / medium.

Because I'm apparently a glutton for pain, I started recently streaming in 2k as I was accepted into the beta, and what's strange is that there's no *increase* to the behavior. Everything is equally off in that what my viewers see will get a bit "choppy" for less than 30 seconds, then resolve itself. This ultimately ends up buffering the stream though, and before long there's a 45-90 second delay between what I'm doing and what they see, so I need to completely stop the stream and restart it. Stopping in this scenario generally takes 20-30 seconds as opposed to the usual 2-3.

As for steps I've taken to try to resolve this myself I've:

• Updated all my drivers
• Updated my BIOS
• Tried with HAGS turned on, and with it turned off
• Tried running with the NVENC H.264 Encoder and with the CPU x264 encoder
• Updated my encoder settings to match those provided by NVidia for my GPU (Watercooled RTX 3090)
• Cleaned up my OBS Scenes and Sources
• Reduced the resolution of my face cam
• Turned on / Enabled Windows BAR
• Confirmed my GPU is running on PCIe 4.0
• Ran MemTest86 with no issues
• Ran several stress tests on my GPU
• Changed which camera I'm using
• Completely wiped my OS and rebuilt my PC from scratch
• Reseated my GPU
• Removed the riser cable from my GPU and completely re-did my cooling runs so the GPU would be running directly to the motherboard
• Searched far and wide for literally any other answers short of making a deal with an Eldritch God to get this to work

I'm literally to the point where I'm wondering if my GPU has been cheating on the tests I've been making it take and I need to replace that, if there's something wrong at a fundamental level with my motherboard or CPU, and I just need to replace the whole things, etc. I'm even considering just getting a laptop so I can use a 2 PC setup and offload everything for OBS to that.

I've attached the most recent log where I experienced this issue, and was actively trying to troubleshoot while live. At around 18:05.49, I stopped the stream and started it again to clear the delay I mentioned above. That stream ended at 21:18, and is followed by a bunch of troubleshooting / cleanup I was trying to do the following day to resolve the issue for the future.

I just don't know anymore, and I can't seem to come up with any other ideas, so if anyone out there can help someone in desperate need of a solution, whether that's something on my PC, or a drink, I would GREATLY appreciate it. Sorry for the huge info dump, but I figure it might help with avoiding some of the initial troubleshooting steps I've already gone through.

15:37:33.475:     - source: 'Facecam Capture' (dshow_input)
15:37:33.475:         - filter: 'NVIDIA Background Removal' (nv_greenscreen_filter)
15:37:33.475:         - filter: '[CamFilter] Goomba Mode' (shader_filter)
15:37:33.475:         - filter: 'NVIDIA Background Blur Filter' (nv_background_blur_filter)

Presumably it is the background removal and blur filters you have on the source, although the log you included shows 0.1% encoder overload which is nearly nothing and not a concern.

 

[SnewSnew]

15:37:33.475:     - source: 'Facecam Capture' (dshow_input)
15:37:33.475:         - filter: 'NVIDIA Background Removal' (nv_greenscreen_filter)
15:37:33.475:         - filter: '[CamFilter] Goomba Mode' (shader_filter)
15:37:33.475:         - filter: 'NVIDIA Background Blur Filter' (nv_background_blur_filter)

Presumably it is the background removal and blur filters you have on the source, although the log you included shows 0.1% encoder overload which is nearly nothing and not a concern.

So the only filter on there that's active is the background removal, but when I ran the log through the analyzer, it told me it had 8.3% encoder overload. Am I misreading the analyzer or misunderstanding something else?

 

[prgmitchell]

So the only filter on there that's active is the background removal, but when I ran the log through the analyzer, it told me it had 8.3% encoder overload. Am I misreading the analyzer or misunderstanding something else?

Looks like there are multiple streams in this log. Still my suggestion is the same, remove (don't just disable) all filters on the camera and test again.

 

[SnewSnew]

So I basically tried a bit of both solutions that were suggested to try to root out anything that could be causing issues / do some "spring cleaning" of scenes and streamline some of my processes.

After running a test stream on my bot account for about 40 minutes with the background removal off and one with it on, then after tinkering for a bit I found that if I set it to Performance and set to only run the refresh frequency in frames at 4, my issues completely disappear with no real downside.

I'm going to try tomorrow for my normal stream at 2k and see if it's all resolved, but if it is, I cannot thank prgmitchell and rockbottom enough for your help. I thought I'd tested without the background removal before and didn't see any improvement, but I either didn't do that, or the cleanup plus the tweaks to the bg removal combined to resolve everything.

Either way, I'm sleeping well tonight so thank you again!