I don't know if you get issues like this often, so I'm sorry if something like this has been posted before, but I can't seem to find any solution so I'm coming to you. I'm not a public streamer, I'm planning to stream games to Discord for my friends. Before I actually start doing that, I wanted to make sure I didn't have any technical issues. And I do. For some reason, even when I'm not recording or streaming, the picture seen in OBS suffers SUPER obnoxious framerate drops, even though the game runs perfectly fine. The canvas shows the captured game running way choppier than 60fps, even though that's what my game runs at. This extends to the windowed projector, which is what I'd be using to stream my games. Sometimes the game runs mostly smoothly with only a few hiccups, but that's rare. I've tried running it in administrator mode, turning game mode on and off, several different settings, and uninstalling and reinstalling, but nothing changes. Has this happened to anyone else and is there a way to fix it please? Thank you.
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OBS canvas dropping frames?
- Thread starter FluulF
- Start date
Here's a log with AMD encoder:
Hey I'm only chiming in here because I noticed there is not a lot of feedback.
My input may or may not be significant.
Are you running OBS on the same machine you are gaming on?
Here's my thoughts: I have difficulty processing video THROUGH OBS let alone trying to run a game on the same machine as OBS.
Processing video THROUGH obs takes 20 - 50% of my machines, typically quad core 3ghz level cpus with NVIDIA hardware encoding. If gamers typically do run OBS on the same machines, it is amazing to me. Seems to me the best course of action is to use something outside of your gaming PC.
Further if game streaming relies on capturing the screen, I don't see how that ever works reliably either. Seems like a really inefficient way to injest into OBS. I have do do it to get Zoom into OBS and its a pain. Again, processing video on another machine/device makes more sense.
Unless you are needing to do further compositing over top of your game output, wouldn't a box dedicated to just streaming a video signal server you better?
But if you do want to composit, you are faced with bringing the video output into another PC with a capture card, with something like a Decklink Mini Recorder. I prefer something that is in the bus rather than a USB port, but you can try those of course.
My input may or may not be significant.
Are you running OBS on the same machine you are gaming on?
Here's my thoughts: I have difficulty processing video THROUGH OBS let alone trying to run a game on the same machine as OBS.
Processing video THROUGH obs takes 20 - 50% of my machines, typically quad core 3ghz level cpus with NVIDIA hardware encoding. If gamers typically do run OBS on the same machines, it is amazing to me. Seems to me the best course of action is to use something outside of your gaming PC.
Further if game streaming relies on capturing the screen, I don't see how that ever works reliably either. Seems like a really inefficient way to injest into OBS. I have do do it to get Zoom into OBS and its a pain. Again, processing video on another machine/device makes more sense.
Unless you are needing to do further compositing over top of your game output, wouldn't a box dedicated to just streaming a video signal server you better?
But if you do want to composit, you are faced with bringing the video output into another PC with a capture card, with something like a Decklink Mini Recorder. I prefer something that is in the bus rather than a USB port, but you can try those of course.
Lawrence_SoCal
Active Member
Just general observations
- AMD GPU encoding offload H.264 for streaming is well-reported to be pretty bad. unfortunately. Do a search in this forum on AMD GPU and encoding settings to see if there is anything to help you
- Your first log does NOT include a required recording or streaming session, so important details not present in that log, but your 2nd log has the details [someone knowledgeable on AMD encoder settings would have to comment, as not something I know about]. Importantly, that 2nd log does NOT show any dropped rendering or encoding frames. Be aware that the OBS log does NOT provide details on what all else is going on with your system.
Further, recognize that if you use OBS in Studio Mode you are forcing the OBS PC to do 2X the screen rendering. And you cause the PC to do more work, when you re-scale video (base canvas to output resolution) though then less data to process... so ymmv
And the OBS monitor would have the lowest priority, so even if it suffers, how is the resulting recording/stream (that which actually counts)?
If the issue is lower game performance, then in general you are dealing with the problem of a running a demanding workload (the game), possibly a bunch of other background stuff, and then adding on top of that real-time video encoding which is VERY computationally demanding. There are lots of bad advice out there on optimizing your Operating System, so beware, but there are important changes to default settings which can help. And of course being aware of what various background tasks are doing, and whether they may interfere.
I recommend monitoring hardware resource (CPU, GPU, RAM, Disk I/O, etc) utilization [for ex. using Task manager’s Performance tab and/or Resource Monitor] to see if your system is being maxed out with your settings. Recognize that such monitoring is very high level and doesn't get into detal on the CPU, nor PCIe bus data transfer, and potential bottlenecks in that realm.. but is a good starting point nonetheless (vs doing the equivalent of driving blind-folded). These articles may have some tips that apply to you https://obsproject.com/wiki/General-Performance-and-Encoding-Issues and https://obsproject.com/wiki/GPU-overload-issues
- AMD GPU encoding offload H.264 for streaming is well-reported to be pretty bad. unfortunately. Do a search in this forum on AMD GPU and encoding settings to see if there is anything to help you
- Your first log does NOT include a required recording or streaming session, so important details not present in that log, but your 2nd log has the details [someone knowledgeable on AMD encoder settings would have to comment, as not something I know about]. Importantly, that 2nd log does NOT show any dropped rendering or encoding frames. Be aware that the OBS log does NOT provide details on what all else is going on with your system.
Further, recognize that if you use OBS in Studio Mode you are forcing the OBS PC to do 2X the screen rendering. And you cause the PC to do more work, when you re-scale video (base canvas to output resolution) though then less data to process... so ymmv
And the OBS monitor would have the lowest priority, so even if it suffers, how is the resulting recording/stream (that which actually counts)?
If the issue is lower game performance, then in general you are dealing with the problem of a running a demanding workload (the game), possibly a bunch of other background stuff, and then adding on top of that real-time video encoding which is VERY computationally demanding. There are lots of bad advice out there on optimizing your Operating System, so beware, but there are important changes to default settings which can help. And of course being aware of what various background tasks are doing, and whether they may interfere.
I recommend monitoring hardware resource (CPU, GPU, RAM, Disk I/O, etc) utilization [for ex. using Task manager’s Performance tab and/or Resource Monitor] to see if your system is being maxed out with your settings. Recognize that such monitoring is very high level and doesn't get into detal on the CPU, nor PCIe bus data transfer, and potential bottlenecks in that realm.. but is a good starting point nonetheless (vs doing the equivalent of driving blind-folded). These articles may have some tips that apply to you https://obsproject.com/wiki/General-Performance-and-Encoding-Issues and https://obsproject.com/wiki/GPU-overload-issues