Douglas Wheeler
New Member
So I've been streaming with a new PC for 6 months or so and I've been getting severe frame drops in all games (every 5 minutes or so my game will drop from 70-80 FPS right down to as low as 10 FPS, or even 5 for about 20 seconds). The frame drops are local - it's not just the stream getting them, it's me, and they're so bad that they render most games unplayable.
I've tried everything to fix the problem - I've downscaled the stream resolution, I've lowered the stream's frame rate, I've switched between x264 and NVENC, I've lowered the stream's bitrate, I've changed the process priority class, I've stopped recording the stream locally. None of these changes helped the problem at all! I try everything I can to take as much load of my main PC as possible - all I have open on my PC is OBS, the game I'm playing, my Twitch channel page (to watch back the stream live, and to read chat). I run Skype on a separate machine completely and output the sound to an external mixer to get the Skype call's audio onto the stream!
As far as I can see the problem is to do with CPU usage. Although I'm not getting a warning in OBS, when monitoring the CPU usage in task manager, at exactly the same time as the frame drop, my CPU speed will drop to around 1GHz and 30% usage (down from 4GHz and 70% usage). I'm not sure what's causing the CPU usage to drop, as the usage wasn't extremely high before the drop happened. I'd have expected the speed to drop if the CPU had maxed out at 100% usage and had to drop down, but not when it was only sitting around 70% usage. I'm also not sure that it has anything to do with the CPU being used for encoding, because I switched to NVENC for encoding briefly, and these frame drops still occurred. However I do only experience these frame drops when streaming, so it definitely has something to do with OBS. (I've linked to some screenshots of the CPU monitoring below in case they're of any use).
Any help to fix this issue would be much appreciated, it's killing me right now!
My Current OBS Settings: http://imgur.com/a/qLS1q
My speedtest.net results: http://www.speedtest.net/result/4541619413.png (I have seen the upload speed go as low as 3 Mb/s, but no lower than that)
CPU Monitoring Screenshots: http://imgur.com/a/RjVAF
My PC specs: CPU - AMD FX-8350 (8 Core, 4GHz), GPU - GeForce GTX 970, OS - Windows 8.1. Can't really remember the specifics of the rest but I've got 16GB of RAM, and 2 Hard Drives (one 4TB, one 2TB)
(I don't know if this makes a difference or not, but I'm running a 3 monitor setup on my PC)
Log file: https://gist.github.com/41272fe4a8fed74bad64
Thanks again for any help! :D
I've tried everything to fix the problem - I've downscaled the stream resolution, I've lowered the stream's frame rate, I've switched between x264 and NVENC, I've lowered the stream's bitrate, I've changed the process priority class, I've stopped recording the stream locally. None of these changes helped the problem at all! I try everything I can to take as much load of my main PC as possible - all I have open on my PC is OBS, the game I'm playing, my Twitch channel page (to watch back the stream live, and to read chat). I run Skype on a separate machine completely and output the sound to an external mixer to get the Skype call's audio onto the stream!
As far as I can see the problem is to do with CPU usage. Although I'm not getting a warning in OBS, when monitoring the CPU usage in task manager, at exactly the same time as the frame drop, my CPU speed will drop to around 1GHz and 30% usage (down from 4GHz and 70% usage). I'm not sure what's causing the CPU usage to drop, as the usage wasn't extremely high before the drop happened. I'd have expected the speed to drop if the CPU had maxed out at 100% usage and had to drop down, but not when it was only sitting around 70% usage. I'm also not sure that it has anything to do with the CPU being used for encoding, because I switched to NVENC for encoding briefly, and these frame drops still occurred. However I do only experience these frame drops when streaming, so it definitely has something to do with OBS. (I've linked to some screenshots of the CPU monitoring below in case they're of any use).
Any help to fix this issue would be much appreciated, it's killing me right now!
My Current OBS Settings: http://imgur.com/a/qLS1q
My speedtest.net results: http://www.speedtest.net/result/4541619413.png (I have seen the upload speed go as low as 3 Mb/s, but no lower than that)
CPU Monitoring Screenshots: http://imgur.com/a/RjVAF
My PC specs: CPU - AMD FX-8350 (8 Core, 4GHz), GPU - GeForce GTX 970, OS - Windows 8.1. Can't really remember the specifics of the rest but I've got 16GB of RAM, and 2 Hard Drives (one 4TB, one 2TB)
(I don't know if this makes a difference or not, but I'm running a 3 monitor setup on my PC)
Log file: https://gist.github.com/41272fe4a8fed74bad64
Thanks again for any help! :D