Massive frame drops while recording.

[Wiissoppii7]

So recently I got a new computer and I used OBS pretty often on my last one, never had much of an issue with it. For some reason though, on my new computer, I get tremendous frame drops on certain games. The game's framerate is totally fine, it's just the recording. The strangest thing too, is that it's only certain games. Minecraft, for example, is absolutely fine, even if I use a high-res texture pack and ray tracing shaders or something crazy, it's totally fine. Frostpunk, on the other hand, drops up to 80% of frames even if in-game I'm getting 144 fps.

I've tried everything from changing file format, resolution, file size, encoding type, using both HDMI and Displayport on two separate monitors, I've tried reinstalling, installing old versions, and even went back to my old computer to copy the settings from that one to my new one, and still no difference. I even had a capture card I could use, for whatever that was worth, and predictably, it didn't help either. Furthermore, when I try recording with NVIDIA's screen recorder, I have no problems.

Another oddity is that if I set the game settings and OBS's settings to 1920x1080 60hz, everything will run smoothly sometimes. Sometimes its just as bad, but this is the only setting it will ever work on, anything different and it'll fail, and even still sometimes the problem returns with these settings.

Lastly, the only difference I can think of is that my old computer was a laptop, and so had integrated graphics. Don't know why or how that could make a difference, but I'm all out of ideas. Below you can see my current computer specs, and an OBS log.

Relevant Specs (New Computer):
CPU: AMD Ryzen 3900X
GPU: NVIDIA RTX 2070
RAM: 2x16 GB

Relevant Specs (Old Laptop Computer):
CPU: Intel i7 7700HQ
GPU: NVIDIA GTX 1060 6GB
RAM: 2x8 GB

Log:
https://pastebin.com/fKkdhkmB

If there's any more information you'd like, I'd be happy to provide it. Really wanna record on this new computer, and I'd very much prefer to do it with OBS. Thanks!

 

[Wiissoppii7]

Bump

 

[Wiissoppii7]

08:56:24.430: Running as administrator: false
08:56:24.901: D3D11 GPU priority setup failed (not admin?
-runobs as admin

-use CBR


08:56:26.069: fps: 59.94 (interval: 166833)
-set fps to 60


-test to set your display Frequenz in windows in windows to 120hz so he can grab every second frame


and please say you dont use your 4k60 pro to record your gameplay from the same PC as you record

Firstly, thank you for the reply, and no, I'm not using the 4k60 Pro in that way. I did try it that way to see if by some freak chance it helped, but it predictably did not.

I did all of these things, although my FPS was already set to 60, so I don't know why it showed it otherwise. Unfortunately, it only made any difference on 1920x1080, in which it gave me a "sometimes work" result, just as before. I decided to uninstall and reinstall, then try your settings.

After the reinstall it worked, which made me very happy, but after a few test recordings, it went back to not working. I didn't close OBS, I didn't change a single setting (other than the ones you suggested) it just all of a sudden stopped working. So it seems that your settings work, but only for a few moments. Thanks again.

 

[Wiissoppii7]

Bump

 

[Wiissoppii7]

Ok, so of course immediately after I bump, I figured out a way to get it working consistently. I'm replying mostly so that if anyone else finds themselves in my predicament, they can do what I did and see if it works for them.

As of now it is running on version 25.0.8 (that's down from 21.0.2 which is what I was using before). The reason I hadn't tried 25 before was because I tried 23 or something like that and it resulted similarly to 26. But, like I said, 25 seems to work.

The settings I used are the recommended recording settings detailed in NVIDIA's NVENC OBS Guide. I followed these settings EXACTLY, and the recording settings specifically, not the streaming settings. Don't forget to scroll down to the advanced settings too. I don't know if that makes a difference, but that's what worked for me.

In my experience, there's not been any fundamental changes between OBS 25 and 26, so I guess I'll stick with 25 for now until some giant new release happens. I hope this helps anyone else with this problem!

 

[FerretBomb]

As a side note, this MAY be caused by having both a Display Capture and a Game Capture in the same scene. It can be an intermittent issue, but Display Capture can and will interfere with both Game and Window Capture sources. One more reason that Display Capture should only ever be used as an absolute last-resort, and in its own scene.

Running OBS as Administrator can help mitigate GPU-choke based frame issues, but we would need to see a logfile from a live streaming or recording session at least 30 seconds in length; your initial log does show significant frame and encoding lag in the ~15 seconds it was going. What game were you playing? Or were you just recording your desktop?

It's recommended to turn OFF both Lookahead and Psycho-Visual Tuning, along with using the Quality preset rather than Max Quality. Those three use CUDA cores, which can significantly increase NVENC encoding lag. Yes, nVidia recommends having them on. All the troubleshooting I've done, they mostly just cause problems, especially in GPU-heavy games.

-use CBR

Do NOT use CBR for local recording. Fricking heck. Stop telling people to do this. It's wasteful, and looks worse.
CBR is needed for streaming due to the infrastructure involved. That's the only time to use it. Local-recording should use CQP or CRF, which are quality-target based encoding methods; writing to a hard drive, you don't need to worry about the upstream bottleneck or CDN replication/delivery servers. It will only use as much bitrate as is needed for a given scene at the set quality level, whereas CBR will waste extra bitrate pointlessly on simple/low-motion scenes, and crap the bed with artifacts on high-motion/complex scenes that need more.

 

[Wiissoppii7]

As a side note, this MAY be caused by having both a Display Capture and a Game Capture in the same scene. It can be an intermittent issue, but Display Capture can and will interfere with both Game and Window Capture sources. One more reason that Display Capture should only ever be used as an absolute last-resort, and in its own scene.

Running OBS as Administrator can help mitigate GPU-choke based frame issues, but we would need to see a logfile from a live streaming or recording session at least 30 seconds in length; your initial log does show significant frame and encoding lag in the ~15 seconds it was going. What game were you playing? Or were you just recording your desktop?

It's recommended to turn OFF both Lookahead and Psycho-Visual Tuning, along with using the Quality preset rather than Max Quality. Those three use CUDA cores, which can significantly increase NVENC encoding lag. Yes, nVidia recommends having them on. All the troubleshooting I've done, they mostly just cause problems, especially in GPU-heavy games.


Do NOT use CBR for local recording. Fricking heck. Stop telling people to do this. It's wasteful, and looks worse.
CBR is needed for streaming due to the infrastructure involved. That's the only time to use it. Local-recording should use CQP or CRF, which are quality-target based encoding methods; writing to a hard drive, you don't need to worry about the upstream bottleneck or CDN replication/delivery servers. It will only use as much bitrate as is needed for a given scene at the set quality level, whereas CBR will waste extra bitrate pointlessly on simple/low-motion scenes, and crap the bed with artifacts on high-motion/complex scenes that need more.

CQP certainly seems to be the way to go.

As far as running both Game and Display capture, I never have them both enabled, but I switch between them depending on what I'm recording. It's never been a problem before, and hasn't been a problem since I've fixed it.

And thanks for the reply! Even though I fixed it (kind of) all this information is good to know. Thank you!

 

[FerretBomb]

CQP certainly seems to be the way to go.

As far as running both Game and Display capture, I never have them both enabled, but I switch between them depending on what I'm recording. It's never been a problem before, and hasn't been a problem since I've fixed it.

And thanks for the reply! Even though I fixed it (kind of) all this information is good to know. Thank you!

They do not need to be both enabled. Simply existing in the same scene can cause the intermittent issue to occur.

I'd recommend downloading the latest OBS in Portable mode to test, without disrupting your existing workaround. It is extremely possible that this may be the root cause of your issue, and be a proper fix rather than going to an older version which may simply be placebo; again, the issue can be intermittent and recur with no rhyme or reason. At the very least it'd gather more data.
Your call of course, but it'd drive me a little nuts having to rely on back-version voodoo and crossed fingers.

 

[Wiissoppii7]

They do not need to be both enabled. Simply existing in the same scene can cause the intermittent issue to occur.

I'd recommend downloading the latest OBS in Portable mode to test, without disrupting your existing workaround. It is extremely possible that this may be the root cause of your issue, and be a proper fix rather than going to an older version which may simply be placebo; again, the issue can be intermittent and recur with no rhyme or reason. At the very least it'd gather more data.
Your call of course, but it'd drive me a little nuts having to rely on back-version voodoo and crossed fingers.

I very much doubt that's the issue since I've had both a display and game capture for around 3 years and never once was there a problem, and with this older version I'm now using, I still have it set that way, and there's no problem. If it comes back, I'll keep your suggestion in mind, it just seems quite unlikely that it's got anything to do with it given the circumstances.