Question / Help OBS forcing 144hz to 60hz

[Andrew Pealock]

Hey all!

Whenever I run OBS and play a game, my 144hz BenQ monitor is forced to 60hz, even though the framerate stays well into the 100s+. I have two monitors, one is the BenQ I mentioned before, and the other is a 60hz TV (Emerson I believe). I put OBS on the TV and game on the BenQ. I've searched around, and found some informative threads about this issue but they all are a bit dated and I wanted to see if there is any new solutions available. I've done the "disable preview" solution, and it definitely solves the issue but then I cannot monitor my stream whatsoever. To my knowledge, this is a Windows issue with DirectDraw on two separate screens causing a forced "lowest common denominator" refresh rate. Has anyone had any luck with another work around other than disabling preview while OBS is running?

TL;DR - #PCMR problems I can't game and stream at 144hz.

PC Specs - 4790k @4.4 - GTX970 - 16gb RAM
Enconding Specs - x264 very fast, 1080p60, CBR5000

Thanks everyone!

 

[BK-Morpheus]

Correct, as soon as some GPU accelerated window is opened on a second monitor with a different refresh-rate, Windows will set the Gaming monitor to the same 60Hz as the second monitor.

You can contact Microsoft for more information (as thousands of other people already did years ago) and wait for them to fix this, or make sure to not use GPU accelerated content on your second monitor.
To do that, you should minimize OBS (maybe disabling the Live Preview will also work) and disable Hardware acceleration in you web-browser, if you use a browser on the second monitor.

 

[romestylez]

Is there a way to check if a specific software is using GPU accerleration ?

 

[BK-Morpheus]

Not sure, but if you're running an updated Win10, your taskmanager should be able to show GPU load for different processes...so this could be helpful, I think (at least I would expect to see no GPU load from a process that is not using GPU acceleration).

 

[romestylez]

Not sure, but if you're running an updated Win10, your taskmanager should be able to show GPU load for different processes...so this could be helpful, I think (at least I would expect to see no GPU load from a process that is not using GPU acceleration).

Dont think thats working. As you can disable the OBS preview and it shouldnt use the gpu accerleration on the second screen anymore. But in the taskmanager you still see OBS using GPU (for sure as its using GPU).

I thought about programs like Chatty (java) but i just deactivated hardware accerleration in java on my system so i should be able to run chatty on the second monitor without switching the gaming monitor to 60hz

 

[BK-Morpheus]

Disabling hardware acceleration for chatty should work. The reason, why OBS will still show up with GPU load, although the preview is disabled is, that OBS is still rendering the scene, but by minimizing it or disabling the preview, it should not be a problem for the refresh-rate anymore.