Question / Help OBS FPS Drops While Playing Game

[OmNom]

Ok, I have tried looking through the forums and tested different things but I am still having an issue with OBS FPS dropping while I am streaming gameplay. I did not have this problem before updating to the latest OBS Studio, which also forced me to update my video card drivers for the NVENC to continue working. Which I found odd since it was working fine before the OBS update, but then OBS said my video driver did not support NVENC, which was obviously not true as I had been using it for 2 months prior. SO I updated the video card driver and ever since OBS has had an average of 15fps-20fps while gaming and streaming. I had a solid 30fps before the updates.

This log file is from a 6 hour stream last night. I did try a couple things while streaming, which was to try switching between Display Capture, and Game Capture to see if it improved the FPS. It did not.

One thing to note, if I click off of the game, and onto OBS, OBS fps instantly jumps to 30 fps and holds solid. as soon as I click back on the game, the fps drop again to ~15 fps. So OBS streams the game just fine if it is not selected.

Any help would be much appreciated! Thank you!

Log File: https://gist.github.com/54f4054dc1ec7c6fe4c9939f4d6e0736

 

[Sapiens]

05:00:20.241: Output 'adv_stream': Number of lagged frames due to rendering lag/stalls: 138544 (21.1%)

GPU is probably getting maxed out, enable vsync or some other type of FPS limiter.

 

[OmNom]

05:00:20.241: Output 'adv_stream': Number of lagged frames due to rendering lag/stalls: 138544 (21.1%)

GPU is probably getting maxed out, enable vsync or some other type of FPS limiter.

I tried this in game, I enabled VSync and it made no difference. This is happening with all games, and have tried the VSync fix in each with no luck. This was one of the fixes I found in the forums here while trying to resolve it myself. And again, this was not an issue before I updated to the latest OBS/Video Drivers. I am tempted to revert video drivers and dig up last version of OBS and simply not update.

Thanks for trying to help though. If you have any other ideas, I would appreciate it.

 

[Sapiens]

What kind of FPS are you getting in-game with vsync enabled, with OBS running vs without?

 

[OmNom]

What kind of FPS are you getting in-game with vsync enabled, with OBS running vs without?

With vsync enabled, I get ~30fps in game with OBS running. with vsync disabled I get 40-50fps. The game doesn't suffer or change. just OBS losing FPS. and again before updating, games were the same, and OBS had a solid 30fps.

 

[OmNom]

I have a feeling it might be something with the video driver. To be honest, I have not updated my video driver in the past couple years simply because I have had bad experiences with updating video drivers in the past. I believe I was using the windows default driver instead of the official driver from the card maker, simply because of such issues. I would have never updated the driver if OBS didn't insist I needed to, to use NVENC, which again worked fine before updating OBS to this latest version. I am not sure what you changed in OBS for the current version that could no longer utilize the existing NVENC support on my system, but since it would not work and insisted I update my drivers, I did. This is why I am thinking of rolling everything back and just being done with it.

 

[OmNom]

System Restore from manually created restore point prior to updating video drivers... failed. Said it could not extract a file from the restore package. So I tried rolling back the video driver alone from the device manager, and this hung up forcing me to hard boot, but shows old drivers in place after boot. Then of course OBS did not work again due to it's complaint of lack of NVENC support. Uninstalled OBS 18.0.1 and reinstalled 17.0.2 and streaming with NVENC worked once again, but now it is having the same frame issues in OBS 17, though they did not seem as drastic. I was seeing some solid 30fps in OBS that would still dip down to 15fps. I guess I will just swap back to 18.0.1 and try to find another solution. The system has 32GB of memory and my graphics card is a fairly good card, with 4GB of memory. I am not opposed to upgrading the card, but if there is anything else I can do to improve the performance, please let me know.

Again, I appreciate you taking the time to assist.

Log from last test (Older Display Drivers & OBS 17.0.2): https://gist.github.com/ef1385e34fdc78a82881aa0570e9cb19

 

[OmNom]

I think I have resolved my issue by simply switching back to x264 encoding, as I have a decent processor. I switched to NVENC because tons of tutorials and people were pointing me in that direction for "best settings" ... but switching back to x264 and using my CPU, I am getting 100+ fps in game and a solid 30fps in OBS.

03:25:08.509: Output 'adv_stream': Total frames output: 418087 (418158 attempted)
03:25:08.509: Output 'adv_stream': Total drawn frames: 417711 (418404 attempted)
03:25:08.509: Output 'adv_stream': Number of lagged frames due to rendering lag/stalls: 693 (0.2%)
03:25:08.509: Output 'adv_stream': Number of dropped frames due to insufficient bandwidth/connection stalls: 71 (0.0%)
03:25:08.509: Video stopped, number of skipped frames due to encoding lag: 158/418385 (0.0%)

Log after 3 hour stream: https://gist.github.com/56854d53f0992182e017c69b06ae643d

I did see some odd behavior, in that my second monitor, which has OBS and Google Chrome opened to my twitch page, was exhibiting severe video stutter, but the stream was rock solid, and the video playback (since twitch stores it) looked fairly flawless as well. The stutter on my second monitor would come and go if I alt tabbed around and selected different windows, I will have to see if I can isolate why it was happening. I had no resource issues in task manager.

Twitch video of stream: https://go.twitch.tv/videos/200889989