Question / Help OBS Laggy Preview even when not recording.

[Maazin]

I've had this problem for a while, and I been looking for a fix everywhere, been going through the OBS logs myself to see if I can figure out what's going on. I recently got a new monitor, and decided to use my old one along with the new one. My old monitor is a 1600x900 60Hz monitor whereas my new one is 2560x1440 165Hz. And after this upgrade, I recorded some PUBG videos and also one Rainbow Six video. And it was all fine until the Windows April Update came around. And my PC updated, and I don't have a way of reversing the update. And I had to re-install voicemeeter and setup all the audio again, and at this point I was doing some audio recording with a group of friends on discord, so I don't notice any issues. And then after that I decided to get into some games, and then I noticed I was getting random black screens, and it was fine after I closed OBS. I read the log and noticed that there were about over 20 memory leaks. And after some time I realized that my preview is very very laggy. My game runs 100+ fps, and OBS is like showing below 30 fps. This wasn't an issue for me at all before the windows update.

I currently don't have the logs with over 20 memory leaks, but I just did a recording test. I tabbed out every now and again to open up task manager, and even switched from Rainbow Six Siege to Cuphead just to check. OBS has 60 fps while playing Cuphead, but struggles with most other games. During the testing, I noticed that every time OBS starts, there is one memory leak.

So far I have tried a patch that I saw posted by a Forum Admin and I reinstalled OBS and am running the latest version. And I also have tried limiting my FPS to 60 with no luck.

My specs are:
Intel Core i7 6700k (4.8Ghz)
32 GB DDR4 RAM
GTX 1070

 

[Maazin]

So after reading through a bit more in my log file, I noticed it is missing some modules, and also a memory leak, other than that not much from the log. So I decided to check my GPU Usage on my PC while having OBS running, and noticed that OBS is using like 15% GPU, and seems the game is trying to fight over OBS for GPU. This was not the case before, I could record completely fine before this windows update.

 

[Maazin]

So the problem was Wallpaper engine. It was using some of the GPU for it's stuff, I closed wallpaper engine and it just decided to fix itself.....

 

[Chagie_jetlife]

Is wallpaper engine an app? I am having the same problems as you though and I'm yet to be able to figure it out.

 

[Maazin]

Wallpaper Engine is an application that you can purchase on Steam to have fancy wallpapers, with animations and sounds and such. I tried a few fixes and you should probably try them aswell. Also make sure you have something like a screenshot of your settings just so you can go back to your normal settings after testing.

1) Make sure you're on the latest version of OBS.
2) Try changing the encoding from software (x264) to hardware (if you have a Nvidia GPU then it's NVENC H.264, might be different on an AMD GPU). If it's already on hardware encoding, change it to software encoding and test it, if it doesn't do anything keep it at hardware encoding.
3) Try limiting your fps in the game, try something like 60 fps. Or you can even check your GPU usage and see if there's any other programs trying to fight for some GPU Usage.

These were some of the fixes I came across, if none of these helped, try recording a few minutes in a game and then stop recording it, and then send the log file. And also see if you have anything that's using GPU other than the game and OBS.