Question / Help New and request help with video recording issues

[Stonehaven]

Hi there, Im running windows 8.1 pro

I receintly been tinkering with OBS the past few months, at first I just streamed a game I play Battlerite to my twitchtv account and I think it worked fine but last night I decide to follow a youtube video showing how to record high quality video in OBS because I wanted to see how it worked. I have done no streaming while recording and don't plan to anytime soon.

So I change the save path and get it set up and record one match as an mp4, I view the mp4 and the sound is not horrible but the video looks as if theres 1min lag; for example; when the video starts- in my, game im in que for a match and the game just begun to load the fight arena (loading screen). while the game is loading I see my mouse moving on screen and the loading bar progressing and its not very lagy but a little lagier than I would expect, so it doesnt seem too too bad at the start but when the game is loaded it staggers through a few frames then hangs on one frame for probably 50sec or more then it staggers through a few more frames then another 50sec and so on.

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The other issue I have is with a game called Neocron, after get everything set up and record gameplay, I view the mp4 of Neocron and the sound is ok but just a black screen.


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Sorry, here the logfile: https://gist.github.com/fb0a40d3e8fa9e25353a8e697acd55fe

 

[Joe33345]

https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/please-post-a-log-with-your-issue-heres-how.23074/

The log might show us where your lag happens :-)

 

[Stonehaven]

heres another 'current' logfile from just now when I made another video of the game battlerite, , viewing the video was same and explained erlier, very lagy

https://gist.github.com/4661297cf3050ed61ffed5f546c7f222

and I also tried Neocron again, it recorded well no problems this time.

 

[Stonehaven]

still having this issue, It is also is lagy with SFV but not as bad, looks as if the frame rate is down.

 

[RytoEX]

Based on your log:

02:58:03.184: Output 'simple_file_output': Number of skipped frames due to encoding lag: 21070 (146.1%)
02:58:03.184: Output 'simple_file_output': Number of lagged frames due to rendering lag/stalls: 1047 (4.9%)

Your CPU is too weak to live encode video and play these games at the same time.

Your second log doesn't show a recording attempt.

 

[koala]

Your CPU is not very powerful. Your streaming is probably laggy as hell, as well as your recodings, which lose most of your frames due to poor encoding performance. According to your log, you have NVENC as hardware encoder available. Switch from x264 to NVENC. Use the simple output settings and choose "Hardware (NVENC)" as encoder for streaming as well as recording. For recording, choose "High Quality, medium size" at recording quality as first attempt.

 

[Stonehaven]

Thanks for the input ill try what you suggest tomorrow. I don't know why the second logfile shows no video recording because I sent it right after recording then viewing the recorded video of SFV...

I did stream Battlerite when I first downloaded OBS and the stream didn't look too bad as I mentioned in the first post, but to be more precise im guessing it was about 20fps maybe a lil higher as I viewed it on the stream, this is the only game I have streamed so far with obs. I know I don't have the best processor and I expected some fps loss with streaming and recording.

But im gonna analyze this out loud (in text) because something doesn't seem right. OK so I can record Neocron fine with not too much fps loss at all but it is an older game and I would expect it to run well with obs recording. When I record Battlerite I get fairly well video until the transition from lobby to the match then frames drop to near Zero. When I record SFV my fps sucks but I can make out just about everything going on in the match.

This is what I cant figure out; why would I get zero frames in Battlerite and about 16-20 frames in SFV when Battlerite has much lower system requirements?

Wouldn't this suggest that obs isn't processing the game recording of Battlerite properly? Shouldn't Battlerite have better performance than SFV with OBS, because SFV has much higher system requirements?

Battlerite
Processor:Dual core from Intel or AMD at 2.8 GHz
Memory:2 GB RAM
Graphics:Intel HD 3000
DirectX:Version 9.0c

SFV
Processor:Intel Core i3-4160 @ 3.60GHz
Memory:6 GB RAM
Graphics:NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 480, GTX 570, GTX 670, or better
DirectX:Version 11

 

[RytoEX]

System requirements as published by publishers are estimates, and they can be wrong. That also doesn't say how "hungry" either game will be for resources such as CPU cycles, GPU cycles, graphics VRAM, memory bandwidth, etc. They also don't illustrate how optimized either game is when it comes to resource usage. Minimum system requirements literally only means "your machine can run this game at minimum settings with this bare minimum configuration". Recommended system requirements are just an estimate of what you need to run the game with less system strain or higher settings, but it still does not mean that the game won't try to consume as many resources as it can.

 

[Stonehaven]

I retrieved this data from task manager while the games were running one at a time and right after playing a match.

Battlerite:
CPU usage: 46.1%
Memorey usage: 798.6 MB

SFV
CPU usage: 50.6
Memory usage: 1030.1 MB

 

[RytoEX]

That still doesn't show GPU load, GPU memory usage, PCI-E bandwidth usage, various system temps, disk usage, or a number of other things that could affect how a system's performance could be affected. It also doesn't show peak CPU load or peak memory usage, it just shows the usage at that one point in time.

It is mildly interesting that running one game versus another game results in different OBS performance. Having the profiler data at the end of different OBS logs from different streaming/recording sessions for those different games would be more interesting, and diagnostically more helpful. To get those, you would need to setup a session for one game, stream/record, then exit OBS, and then do it again for the other game, and then upload the log files for those sessions. That would at least help show what bottleneck(s) your system is hitting.

 

[koala]

If you're streaming, OBS and the game compete for CPU. If OBS needs 75% of your CPU power to just encode the video, your game is left with 25%. But if the game actually need 50%, this could lead to fps drops.
Thus my suggestion to switch to the NVENC hardware encoder that OBS supports - this will make OBS need almost no CPU resources, so the game is able to use the full CPU.

 

[Stonehaven]

Heres the two log files done as you stated RytoEX

Battlerite
https://gist.github.com/7fd53c34487961883f29b509f48bd925

SFV
https://gist.github.com/9e62cc417bc90364565c0426e2e605fd


Ill try the NVENC setting later today

 

[Stonehaven]

After changing to NVENC it records battlerite with AWESOMENESS! I think this issue is solved now.

Thanks a lot for helping me figure that out with me. Its funny though that a stream setting effects recording.

 

[Stonehaven]

So why would anyone ever want to have it on that other setting than NVENC, it must have some benefit?

 

[koala]

More expensive CPUs are powerful enough to encode with the software encoder x264, and this encoder produces slightly better quality than the hardware NVENC encoder. But if you lose frames, the overall result is much worse than the slightly lower picture quality of NVENC. Not many people are even to detect in the first place anyway.
Your CPU isn't even remotely powerful enough to encode with x264 and simultanously run the game, so NVENC is the perfect solution for you. The expensive i7-6700k CPU, on the other hand, would be able to do this with x264.