Question / Help OBS giving frame drops in actual gameplay while streaming

Rice

New Member
In the first post i made here i was telling you guys that i actually got Crossfire working whilist streaming in OBS. This gave me a pretty good performance boost, but still, there is stuff that i need to fix. I'm going to supply you guys with a tutorial on how to get CFX to work with OBS, but first hear me out:

Okay so i have been playing with it again, and there is still a mayor problem i'm experiencing and that is the frame drops in my actual gameplay. It's so frustrating, because i'm playing games like Call of Duty and Battlefield 4, where these frame drops are killing, especially if you are using a 144hz monitor like i'm.

Atleast crossfire is working: it now uses both cards, finally, and the frames are good. But when i enter a scene where there is lots of stuff going on, i'm experiencing FPS issues in my actual gameplay. The stream is perfect, but my actual gameplay is choppy then. I see my frames drop from 91 fps to like 45, which is not good. How come?

I have a i7 2600k processor running at 4.5GHz stable. I've got 24gb of ram, got two HD6970 cards and i'm running Quicksync now to encode. OBS is only using like 5% of my resources. The framedrops in the actual gameplay only happen when i'm streaming. I'm using dxtory to capture my game (not recording, just passing it through to OBS). I'm running my game at 1920x1080, and i'm streaming at only 720p at 30 frames. My system should be capable of doing this right?

Got the latest chipset drivers, latest drivers for my intel HD thingy for quicksync, got the latest drivers for my AMD HD6970 videocards. Got the latest dxtory and the latest OBS. When i'm recording a avi file via Dxtory i don't experience any framedrops using the lagarith codec. Only when i want to stream to twitch this strange issues appear. This shouldnt be happening when using QuickSync right? Since OBS only uses like 5% of my CPU.

I nearly tried everything to work this out. setting affinity and priority to the game and OBS (only 4 cores for the game and 4 seperate cores for OBS) etc etc nothing seems to work out for me here. Even when i leave the affinity and priority as is.

Still need to figure this out. Then i'm going to write a tutorial on how to stream with CFX enabled using OBS. I'm hoping someone has tips over here.

My internet connection is fine, i'm at fiber 100 mbit up and down. Tried to change those settings but wouldnt matter. All i get is choppy frames in actual gameplay but my stream is superb.

Log file: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/60b2094567fcc92014b4
 

FerretBomb

Active Member
Just a quick note, OBS doesn't just use the GPU for capturing game footage (if DXtory is your workaround for XFire mode), it also uses the GPU for compositing, downscaling, and other graphics functions, which could indeed still be causing problems with the crossfire cards.

Also, BF4 is pretty well-known for being coded like crap.
 

Rice

New Member
It's not Battlefield 4 or Call of Duty that's the problem. It's the transcoding. Eventho i can hardware encode with Quicksync, it still manages to take up to many CPU usage for some reason. Eventho OBS only uses 5% CPU. It's just that the transcoding takes up CPU that u can't really see.

I tried to transcode in a different way today, so without OBS, and i had the same choppyness when there was more detailed environments. This is so frustrating. Playing with this stuff for days now and there seems to be no solution to the problem. It's only 720p, that wouldn't be to much of a problem for my system, right?
 

Rice

New Member
Been playing with this again. Still no solution. The encoding makes my gameplay stutter. I'm using QuickSync now. I can confirm it works: I downloaded TechPowerUp GPU-Z and i can actually see my Intel HD3000 GPU use up to 45% when i start streaming. Now the question rizes: Why doesn't it go for the full 100%? It stays on about 43 to 45% when streaming, even when i enter those detailed environments. Still: OBS only uses like 5% CPU power. Both my dedicated GPU's run the game well now.

What could be bottlenecking my performance here?
 
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