Question / Help High cpu usage questions

B

BananaPie

New Member
Hi, I just started using OBS for local recording and have some questions about my CPU usage.

I tested OBS on Skyrim (default ultra with the high resolution texture pack/ Shadows reduced to High / AA and anisotropic filtering on 0),
The game is Vsync 60fps at 1920x1080 with OBS recording at 1280x720 - 30fps:

BUT my CPU usage is between 80~90% when recording, is this bad and is there any way to reduce this with out impacting the image quality too much? or is it fine and I should stop being a worrywort :P


Loggy: https://gist.github.com/a5c94dba26af90b1899f

Also for more demanding games would setting the games resolution too 1280x720 and recording it like that be preferable?
 
Since you are doing local recordings you can change the x264 preset to superfast or ultrafast and see if that will lower your cpu usage enough. The quality will still be fine.
 
The presets affect the compression ratio. A higher preset will give you a smaller file but will use more cpu power at the same time.
 
Isegrim said:
The presets affect the compression ratio. A higher preset will give you a smaller file but will use more cpu power at the same time.
Click to expand...
What? That's not true. A slower preset adds more compression and allows better quality at the same bitrate, is what you should say. It does not give a smaller file; the filesize is resultant from the bitrate used (especially if using constant bitrate) to record it.
BananaPie said:
Hi, I have some questions about my CPU usage.

I tested OBS on Skyrim BUT my CPU usage is between 80~90% when recording, is this bad and is there any way to reduce this with out impacting the image quality too much?
Click to expand...
What you need to understand is that your CPU is quite weak. As much as it is fine for a lot of gaming scenarios, CPU-based recording is not a particularly good decision for it. Skyrim is a fairly CPU-unintensive game.

For how you can increase quality, you can up the bitrate significantly when recording and use an extremely fast preset (like superfast/ultrafast as was recommended to you). The hit from those presets is much less than "veryfast" but it needs a lot more bitrate to compensate.

Alternately, you could simply use them and select "bitrate 1000" and "buffer 0" for local recording as users say this allows the maximum bitrate to be selected for the scene being recorded. It should be okay on such super fast presets, however be warned that this means your CPU load can spike quite high in certain scenes; higher than if you say... locked bitrate to 5000, and a scene requires 10,000 because of a lot of stuff on-screen, etc.
 
D2ultima said:
What? That's not true. A slower preset adds more compression and allows better quality at the same bitrate, is what you should say. It does not give a smaller file; the filesize is resultant from the bitrate used (especially if using constant bitrate) to record it.
Click to expand...
In this case it's absolutly true,

D2ultima said:
Alternately, you could simply use them and select "bitrate 1000" and "buffer 0" for local recording as users say this allows the maximum bitrate to be selected for the scene being recorded. It should be okay on such super fast presets, however be warned that this means your CPU load can spike quite high in certain scenes; higher than if you say... locked bitrate to 5000, and a scene requires 10,000 because of a lot of stuff on-screen, etc.
Click to expand...
He's already using a bitrate of 1000 and a buffer size of 0. He posted a log in case you missed it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top