Question / Help Low Performance in OBS

[Chrisseli]

I have massiv Performance problems with obs, even with my high end pc. When i have obs open, it shows 19-24 fps in the bottom right corner, even if i am not recording. My game runs fine, but obs is lagging as hell. The preview lags hard, the recordings, everything........

I posted my log, so you should see, that i drop like 50% of all frames. pls help

 

[Narcogen]

Make sure game mode is off. (Info is in the signature).

Cap framerate in game. (OBS needs the GPU in order to work).

Between your game and OBS, your GPU is being significantly overloaded.

18:43:16.823: Output 'adv_file_output': Number of lagged frames due to rendering lag/stalls: 7987 (53.4%)

 

[Chrisseli]

Gamemode was already off (as seen in the log). I never capped fps ingame, i am recording gameplay for 2 years now and never changed a single setting. Only with my new computer, stuff like the frame drops happen. On my old pc with way weaker hardware, i am able to record at the exact settings with no framedrops at all.....
And overloading my rtx 2080 in overwatch with recordings at 22000 bitrate seems kind of unrealistic to me, espacially when my old gtx 980 can perform this. So what am i overlooking?

 

[Narcogen]

That is likely just a vagary of how drivers for different cards work. Your old machine, for whatever reason, was not running games at such a high framerate that no GPU resources remained for OBS to work.

Presumably the 2080 is running at a higher framerate than your old card, and it is being so efficient at doing it that OBS cannot render any frames, because the card is never fully idle.

It could be a driver problem, but since you don't mention any performance problems with any games, this seems the most likely.

The bitrate you're recording at has no impact at all on the lag you are experiencing-- you are having rendering lag, not encoding lag. All frames have to be rendered before they can be encoded, and if OBS can't get GPU access to render it, you get duplicate frames. In your logged session, that is happening 50% of the time, which is not a minor issue.

Suggesting that games have their framerates capped in order for OBS to work-- because there is no other way of putting a limit on a game's GPU usage-- is very, very common advice in these forums.

 

[DEDRICK]

The log shows Game Mode off because prior to the update to 1809 you had done the registry edit to disable it. 1809 changed the registry key, AllowAutoGameMode 0 doesn't work anymore.

The logger is detecting the old key AllowAutoGameMode in your registry and incorrectly reporting you have Game Mode off. OBS has no check for the new Game Mode registry key (next release)

Again, AllowAutoGameMode doesn't work anymore as of 1809. You have to turn Game Mode off using the switch found under the Windows Gaming Settings.

 

[Chrisseli]

I turned gamemode off inside the windows settings. That was the first thing i did and dont even changed the registery. Still got the performance issues. The OBS preview is lagging when i dont even record or stream, of course everytime when the gpu is at 100%. Why does my old pc still work with these settings? (core i7 4790, 16gb ram, gtx 980)

 

[Narcogen]

Your GPU isn't at 100% because OBS is lagging, OBS is lagging because your GPU is at 100%. OBS can't work if your GPU is overloaded.

I would suggest making a new scene collection and put only one game capture in it. You've got one scene collection with ten scenes in it, each for a different game. Multiple game captures in one scene can definitely cause performance issues, even if those sources aren't visible or active. I am not sure if that happens in separate scenes. I would make a blank scene collection and add just one game capture to it and see if that changes anything.

If not, you probably really do need to cap your framerate. Games will use all of the GPU if they are allowed to. Framerate cap is the only way to prevent it. Either that or you have a problem with your drivers.

 

[Chrisseli]

I have a new installation of windows on my computer and right i only have one scene and one source in obs and i still have the same problem. I know that the lags come when my gpu is at 100%, but my old gtx 980 always was at 100%. It was fine there and now it is laggy as hell. I tried 5 different drivers for my rtx 2080 and always the same result. Here is also the new Log, but i dont think it will help you....
BTW, there is like an error in the log where it should say "50% of all frames dropped", but my game crashed so there is that error message there (yes game crashing is also something that happens to me sometimes.....).
It is so frustrating when you have like a 2000€+ pc and it is way worse in multitasking then your old dusty roomheater. I hate software and i am a computer sience student, i can say that......

 

[Narcogen]

Nothing new to see in that log; your recording session only lasted one minute.

Your best bet to prevent rendering lag is to cap in-game framerate, or hope that the 2080's drivers have some particular issue causing bad performance (but somehow only for OBS, not your game) that will be fixed.

 

[Chrisseli]

I fixed it! I had to rename my game.exe files. When i rename Overwatch.exe in "Overwat.exe" i dont have any frame drops while rcording. I can watch a 1080p stream, record at insane quality settings and got more then 120 fps ingame. I also set the name back and tryed again and i instantly have frame drops (here not so much because the gpu wasnt at 100% all the time). You can look in the log and see that when i rename it it works. So for everyone out there with frame drops: it is windows game mode or your gpu driver. Now i have i convince Nvidia to fix this .....
Thank you everyone for the help