Question / Help OBS fps effecting game fps / stuttering

Shivaxi

New Member
I find myself having an issue where trying to local record with OBS causes stuttering in game. Experimenting around, I've figured out that if my game is running at 60 fps and I am trying to record at 60 fps, everything is fine. But if my game runs at 60 fps and I want to record at 30 fps, the stuttering occurs, as if OBS is fighting with the game over what FPS to use. I know this is something that should not be happening, but this is the results, even after trying with multiple quality settings, different codecs, etc...always the same results.

Now my monitor naturally has a refresh rate of 120hz, making my games run at 120 fps (vsync). So trying to local record at either 60 or 30 causes stuttering all the time for me, unless forcing my game to have the same FPS as OBS is recording at. However, a weird way to sort of "fix" this is by running something that has an overlay, like an FPS overlay from ShadowPlay or Fraps or Bandicam. Doing this seems to lock my game at the correct FPS, while OBS continues to record just fine.

I took a video captured with OBS to show off what I mean which you can watch here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqenqtCzYCE

Make sure you select 1080p or 720p quality to see the video at 60 fps. In the beginning, I twist left and right slowly using a joystick, and you can clearly see the stuttering happening on which should be a smooth turn back and forth. Then I minimize the game, open Bandicam and turn on the FPS overlay that Bandicam has, and repeat the twisting back and forth test, and it's noticeably smoother.

Can anyone explain why this happens? And are their ways to fix my issue without having to run Bandicam with an overlay?

Here is my last log from recording the video you saw above:

https://gist.github.com/9aa09f5a43d2a469d03d

P.S. I should mention this doesn't happen with anything else like Fraps or Bandicam or Shadowplay (maybe cause of that overlay thing, I don't know). In fact I was using the Nvidia NVENC encoder as well for this video, so shouldn't it give me the same performance that Shadowplay does? Shadowplay has no problem recording at 30 or 60 fps at max 50 mbps quality, 1920x1080, and my games stay solid 120 fps while playing and recording.



EDIT:

Seems to be a vsync issue. If I disable vsync in the game, recording works just fine. I hit 500 to 600 frames without vsync, and when recording it drops to 200 to 300 frames, which is plenty. Only problem is now of course I get screen tearing and the likes without vsync. Seems this is a lose lose situation for me. Not sure why OBS wouldn't like vsync.
 
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