Question / Help Inconsistent frame update

[swiftwinter]

I really don't know how to word this issue. I've experienced this issue for a long time and have posted about it before a long time ago thinking it was just my framerate lowering for some reason, but I looked into it more today because I really want to know what's wrong and discovered that's not the case. This is my one last cry for help with this issue.

Basically I'm streaming at 60fps, and the framerate is consistent and never drops, nor do I drop frames. However, at completely random points the frames don't update properly. By that I mean, imagine there's a circle going across the screen at 60fps back and forth at a constant speed, and every frame that circle moves 1cm consistently, which would look smooth and normal.

The issue I'm having is that instead of that circle moving smoothly every frame, it'll move 1cm one frame, 0.25cm the next frame, then jump 1.75cm the next frame to catch up. The end result is the framerate is still technically 60fps but there is a very bad ghosting effect because the frames aren't updating smoothly.

Hopefully you can understand the issue. I've messed with just about every setting there is so it would be great if someone could let me know what's causing this. Attached a log but I don't think it's gonna help.

 

[BK-Morpheus]

Got exactly the same issue.
During 3hours of streaming or local recording at 60fps, I got perfectly smooth video for ~20-30minutes, than there is 2-3minutes of slightly stuttery video (it looks like microstutter with maybe 57fps) and after that, it goes back to smooth footage for another ~20-30minutes before the next 2-3 minutes of micro stutter appear.

While this is happening, the Overlay animations still seems to bee smooth, the gameplay is still smooth, GPU and CPU cores are all way below 70% load, RAM is not full (~6GB/16GB used).
I can also see the stutter in the OBS preview and most cases exactly those times it is also present in the stream/video.

I run a Win10 Creator Update System which is pretty much fresh installed.
Dual Monitor Setup with the same resolutions and refresh rates (2x 1080p 60Hz).
What I already tried without any success:
- new OBS profile with just one scene (1x Game Capture, 1x Webcam, 1x Wallpaper jpg)
- Win10 Game DVR and Game Mode disabled
- Disable+Close MSI Afterburner and Rivatuner Statistics Server
- Minimize OBS / Disable OBS Preview
- set energy profile to high performance
- set Nvidia performance profile to max performance
- disable Windows pagefiles, enable and increase pagefile

My OBS logs show nothing interesting.
There is always a slight difference between drawn frames and encoded frames, but never stalled/skipped frames.

What I haven't tried:
- NVENC
- XSPLIT or other alternative recording software

 

[Boildown]

Log looks clean to me, but the 1500kbps is pretty low bitrate for 1280x720p60. Does this also happen if you do a local recording at a much higher bitrate?

 

[swiftwinter]

Log looks clean to me, but the 1500kbps is pretty low bitrate for 1280x720p60. Does this also happen if you do a local recording at a much higher bitrate?

1500 bitrate is low, but I'm playing a very graphically simple game so it works pretty fine. And yes I can do a recording at 1500 bitrate or 5000 and I can still get it to happen.

However, I did some more messing around today and possibly fixed the issue by using window capture instead of game capture. Don't ask me why I didn't try this earlier...

Basically I stream a rhythm game and every time I pick a song there's a chance of the framerate issue occurring and not going away until the song is over. So to test if the issue is happening with different settings I just set up a recording and then select a song, look at the OBS preview to see if the framerate is messing up, then quit out and pick the song again and rinse and repeat until I see it happening, at which point I mess with a different setting.

With game capture I'm able to get the issue to happen usually once every minute. When messing with window capture I went a full 15 minutes without the issue happening once. Switched back to game capture after that and the issue came back instantly. Could just be luck, and I won't know for sure until I steam again, but at the very least window capture seems to reduce the occurrence of this issue tremendously.

 

[Boildown]

Interesting. Might be a DirectX incompatibility of some kind. What game is it?

Nevermind, I can see from your log file its Step Mania, a recent game according to its wiki. No idea what would cause this.