Question / Help My AMD Encoder keeps freezing stuttering while recording in-game. Please help!

DoubleO88

New Member
As far as I know the log file attached should have all the info you guys need. If you need anything else please let me know,
My graphics card is a AMD Radeon Pro 560, Software Version 19.8.1, Adrenalin 2019. I actually upgraded the software only after my issue started but it did nothing to fix it, it only persisted.

So I seem to be having an issue no one else seems to be having as I've searched everywhere for it and now I'm forced to create an account and ask for help. Either I'm really dumb and my issue is a simple fix which is why I can't find it anywhere or my graphics card just isn't strong enough, which I refuse to believe but correct me if I'm wrong. I'm also using a Late Macbook Pro 2017/18 laptop with Windows 10 Bootcamp, I know you never get as good performance using a laptop as you would a desktop but I find it hard to believe that I should be having this kind of difficulty just because it's a laptop. I should still be able to do a basic recording, I've streamed loads on this laptop using the CPU Encoder and it's been fine.
So I recently learned that I can use my AMD GPU to encode recordings rather than the CPU which is supposed to be better as it alleviates work from the CPU and it actually worked for a time and I was recording high quality large videos with what felt like perfect smooth gameplay and 1080p 60fps graphics, I set the FPS on OBS to record on 30fps though because it would freeze the recordings if I did anymore, but after about a week of recording gameplay smoothly with the AMD Encoder, it stopped working well and the games started stuttering, even with lower settings. I've tried to record gameplay and I keep getting these random freezes and stutters as I'm IN-GAME, most of the issues I've seen; people claim their games run smoothly but their recorded videos freeze up, my games don't run smoothly at all in-game. I tested like 4 different games running from my SSD and tested them running from my internal HDD and in all of them I experienced the same stutter and freezes during gameplay when I record. The games were PES 2019, PES 2020 Demo, Shaolin vs Wutang and Trickstyle, funnily enough Rocket League was the only game that ran smoothly while recording which I thought was weird considering it was such a fast paced game and notoriously known for lagging.

I must've spent 24 hours testing various issues with my AMD GPU Encoder. Not very tech savvy but from what I've deduced It seems my GPU keeps overloading and when I checked the performance manager thing, it said that I was using 90 to 100% of my GPU when I would run a game, OBS open or not, which would explain why I get the same issues on any recording software, even ReLive which is made for my Graphics Card. I read that OBS needs a little bit of the GPU to work and I thought, 'why are my games using so much GPU?' maybe some of my settings are messed up, but then I read online that it's normal for games to use 80 to 100% of the GPU but then how do people use their graphics card to record and encode if it's normal for most games to use 100% of it? Doesn't make any sense. Rocket League seems to also use 100% of my GPU as well but for some reason, OBS records in-game smoothly so I am totally stumped why the other games can't.

Appreciate any help on this, thank you. I can kinda record on x264 by the way, using the CPU but if I want good quality it slows down the game significantly and I can't play it to a decent standard, especially online. But to play it smoothly the quality suffers, so I'd rather not be forced to use the CPU when the GPU encoder is an option, I feel there must be something I'm missing and it can be fixed.
 

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  • 2019-09-24 06-13-57.txt
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Narcogen

Active Member
Your use case is very specific. I'm guessing there are no replies because hardly anybody is running OBS using VCE/AMF on Macintosh hardware. I have a similar configuration and I don't use it like this, opting for another machine running Windows/Nvidia for encoding.

The AMD encoder is not as good as NVENC, either in terms of quality or efficiency. If you're at 90% load before opening OBS, I'd say you need to reduce in-game fidelity settings or just use ReLive, since OBS will use your GPU for both rendering and encoding if you're using AMF, and using AMF is not really "free" on AMD cards the way NVENC is on Nvidia cards.

06:13:58.350: YUV mode: 709/Full

That should be 709/Partial for most users. This setting can increase load.

https://obsproject.com/forum/resour...t-color-range-settings-guide-test-charts.442/

There's no output session in the log so not much more I (or anyone else) could comment on.
 
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