New here, and overwhelmed by info. LOL. OBS/Whatnot question about my PC specs

T

toddman214

New Member
Hi all. New here, and I've read article after article, including the pinned articles, youtube video, etc, about OBS's impact on other programs. Most things I see say "back this bitrate down, set this resolution lower, try this encoder, etc, etc. My question now should not be around my PC's system abilities, but maybe it is? My specs are below. What happens is that OBS makes everything else on my PC run VERY slowly, to the point that when I simply type a sentence, I have to wait for the sentence to complete. I'm trying to set this up to stream on Whatnot, and when I run a test stream even, the lag is unbearable. I do not think the Whatnot issue is with the internet connection.

New Lenovo LOQ Gaming Laptop, running no additional applications.
Processor - AMD Ryzen 5 7235HS, 3201 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s) <---more than enough
Ram - 32 GB DDR5 SO DIMM RAM 4800MHz clock rate <---more than enough
GPU - Dedicated NVidia GEFORCE RTX 4050 <----more than enough
Internet connection, wired AT&T fiber, 380Mbps up, 360Mbps down <---far more than enough for streaming.

I'm at a loss. :-(
 
No log was provided but since it's a new Lenovo, with OBS closed, start here:

Lenovo Vantage: disable the Network Boost option within the Lenovo Vantage software

Try again, post the log from the session if it's still lagging.
 
Yes, real-time video encoding is VERY computationally demanding. The use of dedicated GPU encoding offload chips can really help, but you have to balance CPU, GPOU, RAM, disk I/O, etc. there are no easy answers/solutions (other then spending minor fortune and having high-price tech expertise support on call.

Your CPU - more than enough? maybe, maybe not... one should NOT assume it is more than enough, unless you have expertise in hardware resource monitoring, and can quantify exactly why you make that claim.
Does that GPU have NVENC chip? and are you using it?

Games often are on of the more taxing workloads a consumer PC can run. Video editing is comparable. IF PC is busy playing game, and you leave background tasks/processes running, then add real-time video compositing on top of that... yea, super easy to overload system. To compound matters, you have a laptop, so thermal throttling is a real issue you should keep an eye on (ie normal for performance capacity to change based on system internal thermals).. ie performance drop as system gets hotter).

OBS Studio needs RAM, CPU, and GPU resources (amongst others). You need to make sure your system has sufficient spare resources. You comment makes it sound like your settings are overloading the system. The wrong video encoding settings could easily do that. Or running out of RAM. Hence earlier reply to see your OBS Studio log (how to do that linked in my .sig)
 
Lawrence_SoCal said:
Yes, real-time video encoding is VERY computationally demanding. The use of dedicated GPU encoding offload chips can really help, but you have to balance CPU, GPOU, RAM, disk I/O, etc. there are no easy answers/solutions (other then spending minor fortune and having high-price tech expertise support on call.

Your CPU - more than enough? maybe, maybe not... one should NOT assume it is more than enough, unless you have expertise in hardware resource monitoring, and can quantify exactly why you make that claim.
Does that GPU have NVENC chip? and are you using it?

Games often are on of the more taxing workloads a consumer PC can run. Video editing is comparable. IF PC is busy playing game, and you leave background tasks/processes running, then add real-time video compositing on top of that... yea, super easy to overload system. To compound matters, you have a laptop, so thermal throttling is a real issue you should keep an eye on (ie normal for performance capacity to change based on system internal thermals).. ie performance drop as system gets hotter).

OBS Studio needs RAM, CPU, and GPU resources (amongst others). You need to make sure your system has sufficient spare resources. You comment makes it sound like your settings are overloading the system. The wrong video encoding settings could easily do that. Or running out of RAM. Hence earlier reply to see your OBS Studio log (how to do that linked in my .sig)
Click to expand...
Thanks for the information, Lawrence. I'm A+, Net+, MTICP, and MCTS Microsoft certified. BUT, that doesn't mean I understand all the OBS stuff, so I appreciate the information. I have a friend who streams Whatnot over OBS and uses a considerably less beefy system than mine, and doesnt have these issues. I'm not even sure he has a dedicated GPU. Ill find out. My GPU does support NVENC. I guess what i was hoping was that someone would see my post, and go "oh yeah...I had the exact same problem. Here's how I fixed it." LOL By the way....when my system is lagging badly, my cpu is averaging around 12%, memory 20%, and disk 1%.
 
Lawrence_SoCal said:
Yes, real-time video encoding is VERY computationally demanding. The use of dedicated GPU encoding offload chips can really help, but you have to balance CPU, GPOU, RAM, disk I/O, etc. there are no easy answers/solutions (other then spending minor fortune and having high-price tech expertise support on call.

Your CPU - more than enough? maybe, maybe not... one should NOT assume it is more than enough, unless you have expertise in hardware resource monitoring, and can quantify exactly why you make that claim.
Does that GPU have NVENC chip? and are you using it?

Games often are on of the more taxing workloads a consumer PC can run. Video editing is comparable. IF PC is busy playing game, and you leave background tasks/processes running, then add real-time video compositing on top of that... yea, super easy to overload system. To compound matters, you have a laptop, so thermal throttling is a real issue you should keep an eye on (ie normal for performance capacity to change based on system internal thermals).. ie performance drop as system gets hotter).

OBS Studio needs RAM, CPU, and GPU resources (amongst others). You need to make sure your system has sufficient spare resources. You comment makes it sound like your settings are overloading the system. The wrong video encoding settings could easily do that. Or running out of RAM. Hence earlier reply to see your OBS Studio log (how to do that linked in my .sig)
Click to expand...
Figured it out. LOL It was a couple things. And I hope this helps someone else out. 1) I had to disable hardware acceleration in Chrome. That sped my system up MASSIVELY! 2) My Whatnot test stream was still extremely laggy...like 30 second lag! I needed to create a "Scene" in OBS. I created one called OBS Virtual Camera. Then when I launched the Whatnot stream, I selected that scene, and started show. Everything is fast and smooth now!
 
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