Question / Help "High Encoding CPU Usage" But Overall CPU Usage < 40%

[Frozelar]

Hello, I've been trying to figure out this problem for days now. I've looked at everything I could find on the internet and have changed every setting I can think of and nothing seems to be working. After being about a minute into streaming, OBS will say "High encoding CPU usage! Consider turning down settings" every 15 or so seconds, and the stream will stutter for a couple of seconds. However, I've turned down settings to the point that OBS itself never uses any more than 15% CPU and overall CPU usage never exceeds 40%, and I still experience this issue. I am on a laptop, and it certainly doesn't have great hardware (AMD quad core CPU @ 2.3 GHz), but I feel like this shouldn't be happening regardless? I dunno.
Anyways, when I say I turned down settings, I mean that I've downscaled it to 818x460 with the Bilinear filter, set it to 30 fps, and I've even set the CPU preset to superfast. And I've tried fiddling around with like every single other setting I could find in OBS.

Here's a log.
Here's my computer.
I'm streaming Valdis Story: Abyssal City. But the issue seems to happen in other games too, like Super House of Dead Ninjas.

I'm at a loss, but I can't help but feel that I'm missing something blatantly obvious, haha. I hope that's not the case. Anyways, any help would be very much appreciated. Thank you for your time!

 

[Frozelar]

It occurred to me that I may not have included quite enough information in the main thread post? If it helps at all, here's a list of everything I've tried changing:

• Use CBR on/off
• Quality balance at values between 2 and 10
• Enable CBR padding on/off
• Changing bitrate and buffer size to values between 200 and 900
• Downscaling resolution all the way to 512x288 with bilinear filtering
• 30 and 20 FPS
• Normal, above normal, and high process priority class
• Use multithreaded optimizations on/off
• Disable encoding while previewing on/off
• x264 CPU preset to veryfast, superfast, and ultrafast
• Encoding profile to both high and main
• Keyframe interval at 0 and 2
• Use CFR on/off
• Encode in full range on/off

The spikes also happen when recording locally to my hard drive, just like they do when streaming. And I've tried using both game capture and window capture, and disabling the preview window. I literally don't know of anything else I could try.

Something that seems really odd to me is that when monitoring my CPU, there are NO spikes whatsoever, even when the "high encoding CPU usage" message pops up. It's at a steady value that is below 20%, depending on what settings I've changed for that particular test stream.

Anyways, again, thank you in advance for any help at all. Please tell me if there's any further information whatsoever that I need to clarify.

 

[Kirby]

If anyone has a solution to this problem, PLEASE share. I'm having the same issue.
I built a brand new PC a few months back and streamed a few times before this problem came up.
Running Windows 10, Geforce 980ti, Intel i-5, Hardware should definitely not be an issue.