Mouse lagging/shuttering when screen-recording with OBS on a laptop with DisplayLink-connected external monitors

llinfeng

New Member
Short question - is it an optimization issue that OBS screen-recording may leave a laptop with DisplayLink-connected monitors less responsive? Or, would adopting an even lower recording setting save me from the following situation?

I use OBS to record my work sessions, where the sources include all my monitors and another 1080P webcam. The canvas size is 6000x3840. The recording size is 1GB for an hour, roughly speaking. The goal is to keep a visual log of my workweek when I do my weekly review and planning during the weekend.​
I've tuned the recording settings to be pretty low (10FPS, 2000 Kbps Bitrate under CBR) and the CPU usage by OBS is capped at 30% or so when the recording is running. Overall, the system CPU usage is lower than 80% or so. In short, I don't think OBS is suffering from any throttling issue itself.​
The problem: with OBS recording running, my mouse lags and switching focus to another window takes a second or so. Specifically, when I use the mouse to activate another window by clicking on that window, the mouse will stick at the spot where I clicked until the window is "fully" activated.​
The device: I am using a laptop with an Intel 11th Gen CPU that has Xe graphics, with Win 10 OS. It looks like my next option is to buy a new GPU enclosure and run all my monitors through an external graph card.​

The mouse problem starts to occur when I added two external monitors through a DisplayLink adapter, which does take a small toll on the CPU usage.
 
Top