OBS Having The Same Issues Across Multiple PCs

[Shotis Otis]

I've been a big fan of OBS for years. No watermark, insane ease-of use and features, and it's just an overall great piece of software... when it works.

For the past year or so, OBS has had an issue where video recordings from it are entirely unusable and insanely laggy or just a few frames by the end of the clip. This was present on my desktop PC (i5-3570k, GTX 960), my old laptop (Ryzen 3 3250u, Vega 3 graphics), and even now on my BRAND NEW laptop (i5-1135G7, Iris Xe graphics).

I've attached my log as well as a video I recorded from OBS to show how bad the issue is. The gameplay was a very smooth 60FPS.
The log: -> https://obsproject.com/logs/wBdmzdRNuwXERLEk
The video -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrY2xiW2T_A&ab_channel=PopRoblox

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

First - you are ignoring the BIG BOLD warning about recording to MP4... ugh
And those PCs are either ancient (it-3xxx series) or U model CPU, which is optimized for battery life, not the computationally demanding task of real-time video encoding (so thermal throttling a real possible challenge). And then the newer, but still lower-end CPU

With that said, your settings aren't outrageous. but you are trying to record at 60fps and

19:39:08.110: Output 'simple_file_output': Number of lagged frames due to rendering lag/stalls: 243 (2.7%)​

19:39:08.111: Video stopped, number of skipped frames due to encoding lag: 7057/8633 (81.7%)​

Your QSV encoding settings are more than your system can deliver with latest OS updates and firmware (not sure if your latest CPU is impacted by BIOS/OS updates to overcome Intel CPU security issues). Now, whether it will help or not I can't say (details of other OS activity not in OBS log), but maybe some OS optimizations for an under-powered system are in order? And not running OBS in Studio mode where you have 2X the rendering workload.

So, do NOT take my word for any of this. I'm just trying to provide a quick point of reference. Hopefully someone with more specific knowledge will comment
in the mean time, I recommend monitoring hardware resource (CPU, GPU, RAM, Disk I/O, etc) utilization [for ex. using Task manager’s Performance tab and/or Resource Monitor] to see if your system is being maxed out with your settings
and these might help
- https://obsproject.com/wiki/General-Performance-and-Encoding-Issues
- https://obsproject.com/wiki/GPU-overload-issues
- after making adjustments, then try the log Analyzer https://obsproject.com/tools/analyzer

 

[Shotis Otis]

Could you rephrase everything so it's easier to understand? Sorry lol.
Also I usually record in .mkv because it's a bit easier to transport across my softwares, but I wanted to try .mp4 to see if results are better