Question / Help OBS game stutter/lag?

Fishcannon

New Member
I have just started using obs so I don't really know much about it... when i record i notice my game stuttering a bit wondering if anyone can help me with why that might be cause it.

This is my system specs:
CPU:
Intel core i7 8700k 3.7GHz CL 12MB

Motherboard:
MSI z370m Gaming Pro AC LGA1151-CL mATX

GPU:
MSI GeForce GTX1080ti Gaming X 11GB GDDR5X DVI 2xHDMI 2xDisplayport

Ram:
G.Skill 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 Trident Z RGB 2400MHz

PSU:
eVGA SuperNOVA G1 + 650W Fully Modular 80PLUS Gold Power Supply

Cooling:
2x Thermaltake Riing Plus 3 pack 120mm RGB LED Premium Edition Fans w/ Controller
Cooler Master Hyper TX3 EVO CPU Cooler

Storage:
Samsung 970 EVO series 500GB M.2 NVMe SSD
WD Blue WD20EZRZ 3.5" 2TB 64MB 5400RPM
 

DannyZ

New Member
Yea the new version is pretty terrible, have you disabled game mode in windows settings and nvidia shawdowplay in Geforce Experience?
If yes and still lagging, try going back to an older version, that seems to solve the problem for now.
 

Fishcannon

New Member
shadow play was turned on still... it was doing strange thing where the button to edit the setting or turn it on or off wasn't showing up at all... and i just turned off game mode, will try it now and see what happens. cheers my guy
 

Agamemnus

Member
@DannyZ is all over it. Game Bar and Game DVR are interfering little things. You want to make sure that OBS is the only program that's trying to tap into your game, if there's more than one, they fight over it.

Also, if your game is maxing out your GPU, that causes problems too. It's strangely common. Lower your graphics and cap your FPS in game to make sure that the graphics card isn't 100% in use, you want it 90% or lower in the most complicated fight scenes. Once you've secured this, give OBS another whirl.
 

Fishcannon

New Member
i made sure that shadow play and the windows thing are turned off and i did notice a lot better performance, however there was still a little, but it seemed to happen after a little bit of gameplay, i always run my games and the lowest possible setting because i play a lot of competitive so i wanna get the best fps i can, i will check the usage next time i am in. Danny also said about change back to an older version of obs because it is more stable. how would one go about doing that???and which version should i go back to to get the best performance?

P.s i am assuming i should cap my fps to my monitor hrtz?
 

Agamemnus

Member
You just need to cap your game fps to a rate that is a little lower than what it can achieve. For example, Overwatch has a hard cap of 300, but my monitor is 144. If my game will run uncapped at 180, then the 144 mark seems like a great solution. But if my monitor only gets to 150, and sometimes drops to 140 mid-teamfight.... Then there's a new problem. It means if I cap it to 144, during a team-fight I will get lag on the stream. So I'd cap it to 120 and take the performance hit to my gameplay, for the sake of the stream.

I do agree that v22 of OBS seemed to compete for GPU resources during the render phase a little better than v23 does. But I'm not 100% sure it isn't just because so many people are using the CUDA presets without realising what they're doing. So I don't know for sure. It's worth a shot, I don't know where to find it though. I have a copy of the installation still on my disk but I'm terrified of copyright laws.... :(
 

Fishcannon

New Member
You just need to cap your game fps to a rate that is a little lower than what it can achieve. For example, Overwatch has a hard cap of 300, but my monitor is 144. If my game will run uncapped at 180, then the 144 mark seems like a great solution. But if my monitor only gets to 150, and sometimes drops to 140 mid-teamfight.... Then there's a new problem. It means if I cap it to 144, during a team-fight I will get lag on the stream. So I'd cap it to 120 and take the performance hit to my gameplay, for the sake of the stream.

I can run Overwatch at 300fps not recording. My monitor is 165 hrtz. Should i just cap the fps to 200? or go the the hrtz of my my monitor, so 165?
 

Fishcannon

New Member
i just had a look at it and tried to cap my fps.. i noticed that it keeps dropping below 100 to like 80....... but the it goes straight back to 300....... wtf
 

Agamemnus

Member
If you're hitting 300 I would normally think that 200 is more than enough of a cut. The reason for your sudden drops could be anything.... If your graphics quality in-game isn't set to the lowest, try lower it and see if you get the same fluctuation. I have an RTX 2070 and my monitor is 144Hz, but when I play without streaming, I leave it uncapped and it smashes 200, and sometimes drops down to around 160 or so that I notice. When I'm streaming, I cap it to 120 and it doesn't skip a beat.

Your mileage may vary.
 

Fishcannon

New Member
If you're hitting 300 I would normally think that 200 is more than enough of a cut. The reason for your sudden drops could be anything.... If your graphics quality in-game isn't set to the lowest, try lower it and see if you get the same fluctuation. I have an RTX 2070 and my monitor is 144Hz, but when I play without streaming, I leave it uncapped and it smashes 200, and sometimes drops down to around 160 or so that I notice. When I'm streaming, I cap it to 120 and it doesn't skip a beat.

Your mileage may vary.
everything is set as low as possible, i never put my game settings to anything other than low. my monitor is 165HZ. I tried to set it to cap it to 200 and i there were problesm, dropped it to 150 still problems and i even dropped it to 80 adnt here were still issue... i am so confused
 

Agamemnus

Member
Whatever is causing you to drop to 80 while OBS is not open, that is the thing you need to find. It could be the game itself, it could be something else running in Windows that is interfering.
 
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