Question / Help OBS Choppy/Laggy Recordings

[Jaredz]

Hello all,

I've just about visited every forum and thread on most obvious websites, and none were able to help diagnose my issue.
I am attempting to record (not stream), a select few games (Modern Warfare, The Forest), and no matter what the setting, regardless of encoder, bitrate, rate control, keyframe interval, profile, etc, the video is never the same quality, and usually the video is always choppy/laggy with stuttering frames. When recording, I monitored my CPU, SSD(s) (I am recording to the second 1TB SSD, nothing is on there besides what I record to it), my GPU, etc, and nothing went above normal readings, nor maxed out at any given time. If you can please help with advice, that would be greatly appreciated, thank you.

Specs:
1440p 144hz Dell Monitor
1070 Superclocked
i7-8700k @4.2GHz
16Gb Ram
500 Gb 850 evo + 1TB 970 Evo SSD

2020-01-20 00-34-02 OBS Recording

This is "2020-01-20 00-34-02 OBS Recording" by J Zink on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

vimeo.com

 

[PaulCampbell7]

So the actual gameplay is working fine, right? Have you ever been able to get stable recordings or has this been an issue since the very first time you used OBS?

Do me a favor and either change your output resolution to match your base resolution in the recording, or if your setup can't handle recording at 1440, temporarily change your monitors resolution to 1080p and record at 1080p.

Also, are you recording directly to .mp4? I've heard people have had issues with that. Try recording to a different format and see if that changes anything.

 

[koala]

According to your logs, all your recordings are perfect. Not a single dropped frame. Neither CPU nor GPU is overloaded.

Try a different media player such as VLC or Media Player Classic. The Windows integrated media player isn't always working well will videos with higher bitrate.

You are using a 144Hz monitor, so what fps is the game you're recording? If the game fps isn't a multiple of the video fps, a slight stuttering is expected and unavoidable. If you record with 60 fps, set your game to 120 fps, so OBS drops every other frame to convert 120 to 60. That's appearing smooth to the human eye. If the game is playing with 144 fps, OBS has to drop not every other frame but a few more, but not in a steady way, and this introduces what is perceived as stutter or judder.

Your best setting for recording would be simple output mode, nvenc as encoder and "indistinguishable quality" as quality setting.

 

[Jaredz]

So the actual gameplay is working fine, right? Have you ever been able to get stable recordings or has this been an issue since the very first time you used OBS?

Do me a favor and either change your output resolution to match your base resolution in the recording, or if your setup can't handle recording at 1440, temporarily change your monitors resolution to 1080p and record at 1080p.

Also, are you recording directly to .mp4? I've heard people have had issues with that. Try recording to a different format and see if that changes anything.

Gameplay is smooth as usual, and I have not been able to get stable recordings at all with OBS since I started using it. Did both your suggestions and first changed my output resolution to match, then when that didn't improve I changed my monitors native resolution to 1080p and the recording was the same (slightly worse IMO)

I also did all this while on a different format besides MP4 (recorded as ts)

 

[Jaredz]

According to your logs, all your recordings are perfect. Not a single dropped frame. Neither CPU nor GPU is overloaded.

Try a different media player such as VLC or Media Player Classic. The Windows integrated media player isn't always working well will videos with higher bitrate.

You are using a 144Hz monitor, so what fps is the game you're recording? If the game fps isn't a multiple of the video fps, a slight stuttering is expected and unavoidable. If you record with 60 fps, set your game to 120 fps, so OBS drops every other frame to convert 120 to 60. That's appearing smooth to the human eye. If the game is playing with 144 fps, OBS has to drop not every other frame but a few more, but not in a steady way, and this introduces what is perceived as stutter or judder.

Your best setting for recording would be simple output mode, nvenc as encoder and "indistinguishable quality" as quality setting.

Using VLC to view the recordings as of now, and had completely forgotten about the multiple of 60 fps so I limited my in-game to 120fps and followed all of your recording settings

The quality is now up to par but the video stuttering is still extremely prominent, would I need to adjust my monitors FPS as well to 120fps?

 

[vAfrid]

I have the same problem, using MPC-HC Player. No game lag, no recording problem, onvly my video has those framedrops. But it´s only the video, and i have a 60fps monitor, and i record on 60 fps. I don´t think theré a problem with the monitor

 

[FonkeyMonkey]

I have the exact same issue.
High end PC and GPU.
I've really tried everything. It's utterly unusable

 

[TOCA2FREAK]

I'm also having same issue.
Windows 10 latest version
Intel 10600k at 5ghz
Nvidia 2080ti
32gb Ram
M.2 nvme ssd

 

[BK-Morpheus]

same here..had this with Intel i7, Ryzen 3700x, GTX1070, Vega56. FPS capped to 60, no sign of rendering or encoding lag in my logs, but still every now and then there are 1-2 minutes of footage with stutter in it.

 

[jathosguy]

Same exact problem. Rtx 2080 ti, i7 9900k, M.2 drive. Tried everything mentioned and more. Switched to xsplit gamecaster to test and it records amazing. I recorded 1440p ultra high quality with no issues. I couldnt even record at 720p medium settings on obs. OBS might have lost me on this one.

 

[budgewink]

Same here, i'd love to find the solution to the probelm. Ryzen 2700x RTX2070, NVME drive.

 

[Reboprundgren]

I'm gonna throw my hat in here as well, I'm experiencing the same situation--
Log file: https://obsproject.com/logs/DIV1o3xxWjbY4upe

Things run perfectly smooth at 60fps, OBS reports no skipped or missed frames, and GPU and CPU usage both sit comfortably around 60%... Still, most of the recording has a noticeably low framerate, with only moments here-and-there hitting a smooth 60FPS.

I've been bashing my head against the wall trying to get OBS to smooth out for a full month now-- It's kind of unacceptable. How the shit can we get past this?

 

[Reboprundgren]

Okay, I'm a feckin' idiot... The dope-ass Jessica from the Discord server informed me that capping my FPS at 60 via Rivatuner still doesn't change the fact that my refresh rate of 144hz was screwing things up. Changed it to 120hz & bada-bing..! Things are much smoother. Sorry for the trouble, folks!

 

[BK-Morpheus]

Just to clarify: The problem I was referring to earlier hat nothing to do with the usual refreshrate problems that people run into (no offense, Rebop).

I'm well aware, that 60fps footage will show stutter, if played back with 70Hz, 75Hz or 144Hz refreshrate and I'm also aware of Windows problem with mixed refreshrate multi-monitor setups and running GPU accelerated stuff (like videoplayback in browser or OBS live preview) on the second monitor.
So in my case, I'm already avoiding this trap by running all my tests with 60Hz on both monitors.

Repobrundgren had a different "problem" than many others in this thread are referring to.
Although the occasional stutter that I'm talking about seems to be connected to some kind of frame pacing / sync issues.
Usually I would expect OBS to be able to record perfectly smooth 60fps footage, if my Game is running with a solid fps limit (for exmaple 60Hz with Vsync on) and no bottlenecks are in place (not a single thread on my CPU is exceeding 35% load, GPU is also hovering below 50%).
No rendering lag, no encoder overload no OBS sources mess (just one game capture source) ..the logs are not showing any problem.
Yet OBS still manages to hiccup the framerate or sync of frames (maybe wrong frame pacing) once in a while. The result is some stutter in the recording. The stutter usually disappears after 1-2minutes and comes back later (maybe 5min later, maybe 25min later).
It can usually be spotted while recording/streaming, as the preview is also showing signs of stutter in those moments.
Often the stutter can be fixed instantly by changing focus from the game to another program and back to the game (which in my opinion is another sign of some kind of frame timing sync problem).

This has been going on for years and years. Researching about this behavior is a bit tricky, because usually I only find threads where the root of the problem is totally different.

Most of the time I find just the usual stuff like
- using wrong or a shitload of sources (monitor capture source instead of game capture or multiple window/monitor/game capture sources etc.)
- running multi monitor mixed refresh-rates with gpu accelerated content running on the seceond monitor
- not using a proper fps limit (aka rendering lag and ingame fps not matching recorded fps = fluctuating frame timings etc.)

In many cases it's easy to spot, that those threads are not talking about the same problem that I have myself, because there is evidence in their log files (rendering or encoding lag for example).

 

[Fumetsu Htio]

I have a funny take on this choppy recording (I am new to OBS).

I encountered choppy recording while viewing the recording and OBS is still open.
When I closed OBS, the recording becomes stable/normal.

So my take is that OBS was lagging the system while viewing the video. Try to close OBS and review the video

 

[AirBiscuit]

Have a similar problem. It's very pronounced backwards-forwards choppiness which is most noticeable when moving straight ahead in game, it's always been this way any time I streamed or recorded Modern Warfare and it's also a problem in Black Ops Cold War as well.

 

[nouser]

Oof so to new users who tried using this super basic function of OBS only to find it's worse than what you'd get out of the free version of bandicam, the people behind OBS are obviously uninterested in fixing it. So, if something wants to be unusable that badly, just let it be unusable.
I tried reaching out to their support which is . . . I've had more polite conversations with the dude I'm about to bout in my boxing class. Creepy little moderators on major delusional power trips. So screw it, OBS just doesn't want to be considered the go-to in the gaming community anymore and I say we let them.

 

[Sapiens]

Oof so to new users who tried using this super basic function of OBS only to find it's worse than what you'd get out of the free version of bandicam, the people behind OBS are obviously uninterested in fixing it. So, if something wants to be unusable that badly, just let it be unusable.
I tried reaching out to their support which is . . . I've had more polite conversations with the dude I'm about to bout in my boxing class. Creepy little moderators on major delusional power trips. So screw it, OBS just doesn't want to be considered the go-to in the gaming community anymore and I say we let them.

Hi Ludicade,

Please don't hijack other users' threads, especially those almost a year old, just to soapbox about how you're unhappy with the software. Performance issues tend to be unique to a user's system and are not OBS bugs to be fixed. If you need help with OBS there are plenty of people to assist (we tried to do this in Discord but you refused). You can also make your own thread here and post a log and we'll see what we can do for you. If you have a problem with me personally there are also other users and support volunteers around.