Question / Help High CPU usage after 25.0.7 and is it possible to use OBS on another machine while recording what I do on the first machine?

kimsia

kimsia

New Member
Hi there, I am new to OBS as well. Before OBS 25.0.7 it was consuming abt 30% of my CPU in mac.

Now after I upgrade to 25.0.7 it consumes 70% and sometimes it crashes all of a sudden. I was wondering if there's a way I can use an older version? And my main use is to record how I use my mac for my own programming and writing as a way to play back and analyze. So is there a way I can record using OBS on my mac while the OBS is playing from another machine so it doesn't consume as much resources?
 
You can use the old version.
In the apps folder rename OBS to something like OBS-New or dump it in the trash.
Download the old version, I think it was 24.0.06
Install it.

We definitely had issues livestream last Sunday with the new version. We saw things we haven't seen before and it seemed like we were using more cpu. I later tried to recreate the stream and tried the old version and didn't see much difference, but now in a more controlled environment I'm seeing something like a 20% increase in cpu utilization with 25.0.7.
 
Thanks.. but 24.0.6 now also crashes after usage for a while. Has never happened before.

Tho 24.0.6 has a lower CPU usage compared to 25.0.7 (~40% not the 30% of the past but acceptable)

I am sad :(
 
Same here: Since v25 CPU load increased significantly with identical settings. Both when idling and streaming (x264). Because this is completely unusable for me I downgraded to 24.0.6 and everything is working fine again.

Will stay away from 25.x versions until a fix is explicitly stated in the change log.
 
Just wondering, is OBS displaying CPU usage correctly for you guys? For me it isn't...

Screenshot 2020-04-26 at 10.57.24.png
 
I've the same issue and ran some tests with:
- 23.2.1
- 24.0.2
- 25.0.7

Running on Macbook Pro with:
- 2,4 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9
- 32GB ram
- macOS Catalina 10.15.3
- Radeon Pro Vega 20 4 GB

All had the same issue, after some time in idle state, so not even recording, the CPU goes to 70-80% making the cooling fans spin. This is so loud that my mic records the sound.

I notice the same as @moertel has. Real CPU of OBS is around 70-80% while the OBS screen shows around 5%
 
I tried a couple of older versions of OBS with no luck. CPU usage is currently sitting at 50% - 60% while streaming but only 15% when idle.
 
I managed to solve this issue. When using Display Capture my CPU is around 20% When I do the same with Window Capture the CPU goes back to 80%

So it looks like Window Capture has something to do with the high CPU load. I am curious if other experience the same, and have a lower load when using Display Capture.
 
@osi314 huh, weird. I don't have a Window Capture in any of my scenes and yet I see the high CPU load.

kimsia said:
Sorry but how do I check this? I am on a macOS catalina
Click to expand...
@kimsia I've captured this with a tool called "htop" but you should be able to get the same info by opening "Activity Monitor" (‎⁨Applications⁩ ▸ ⁨Utilities ▸ Activity Monitor) and navigating to the "CPU" tab.
 
The cpu % number OBS reports seems to be cpu % you get in activity monitor (or top from a command line or...) for the OBS Process only divided by the numbers of cores (real and virtual - this number is what you see from activity monitor if you view cpu history).
 
This appears to overlap with this reported bug. I see higher than normal CPU usage whether I use a window capture or not, but the CPU usage goes crazy high with a window capture.
 
Hey folks - It's been a few months. What have you guys stuck with since? I have the same comp as the gent before (i9 MacBook Pro) and I'm getting anywhere from 70%-90% of pure egg cookin' CPU power happening every time I try to stream...
 
Hey any update here? I've tried everything and I just can't stream because of this. Always at about 20+ minutes cpu just stacks up and you can't stop it
 
osi314 said:
I managed to solve this issue. When using Display Capture my CPU is around 20% When I do the same with Window Capture the CPU goes back to 80%

So it looks like Window Capture has something to do with the high CPU load. I am curious if other experience the same, and have a lower load when using Display Capture.
Click to expand...
I have tried changing from Window to Display Capture, and definitely it decreases the load and it can be usable. With Window capture I could not even do the proper recording. Thanks for the tip.
 
I have the same problem on a Mac (macOS Mojave 10.14.6) with OBS 26.1.0 (64-bit). Display capture has reasonable CPU requirements, but window capture pushes CPU usage up by about 10% as reported in OBS, which is equivalent to about 80% of a CPU core. I've found a couple of solutions:

1) I can use Syphoner to capture a window and send it to OBS as a Syphon input. This pretty much eliminates the CPU usage in OBS, and Syphoner only uses about 25% of one core.

2) I am mainly using this to capture the screen of a Windows tablet. I previously did this by using VNC on the Mac to connect to a VNC client on the Windows computer, then displayed the Mac VNC window in OBS via Window Capture. I can eliminate all of that by running an NDI client on the Windows computer and the NDI-OBS plugin on the Mac. Then I get persistent, low-cpu screen mirroring from the Windows tablet straight into OBS. Unfortunately, latency goes up from about 0.5 s for VNC to about 1 s for NDI.
 
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