OBS Lags Seemingly No Matter What

[Tronk69]

I apologize if this may be a silly issue, and I don't have a log file available, but I will share what information I can. Seemingly no matter what settings I try, I ALWAYS get some spots of lag during my OBS recordings and it's really frustrating.

I am recording a Nintendo Switch at 1080p30 using an Avermedia Live Gamer 4k capture card. My pc specs are as follows:

CPU: Ryzen 7 3700X (8 core/16 thread)

RAM: 32gb

GPU: RTX 2060 w/12gb DDR6

and it's being recorded to an internal HDD.

Most of the recordings go super smoothly and they look exactly how they should, but every now and then (maybe 20 minutes apart in the worst case) I get little stutters in the frames and it looks awkward. And in the case of the game I am playing (Xenoblade 2) it could mean I have to go and re-record a major cutscene that I need to have clean footage of.


My OBS settings for recording are thus:

Type: Standard

Recording Format: MKV

Audio Track: 1

Encoder: NVIDIA NVENC H.264 (new)



Rate Control: CQP

CQ Level: 20

Keyframe Interval: 2

Preset: Quality

Profile: High

Look-ahead & Psycho Visual Tuning are both off

GPU: 0

Max B-frames: 2

It shouldn't be my PC specs, right? I have task manager open while it's running and the GPU is AT MOST using 40% resources and my CPU barely goes above 30% (mostly due to other programs on my PC). I've tried looking up this issue and I rarely end up finding anything that actually helps. My PC should be fully capable of 1080p30 with no issues and I don't know what I need to change to keep the quality I want without stuttering.

I heard game capture and display capture could interfere with one another so I made a scene specifically for the Live Gamer 4k and it still has the issue anyways. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

[ZeDiglett]

I've been dealing with this same problem for a couple of months now. I'm using an Elgato HD60S to record footage of Switch games (I'm recording Xenoblade right now as a matter of fact), and for the first few months it worked great, but one day I just started getting intermittent framedrops recording the Elgato with OBS for no apparent reason. I've tried recording the Elgato with Elgato Game Capture and it works fine, and I've tested recording PC games with OBS and had no issues, so it seems to be a problem with OBS recording capture devices specifically. Of all the things I've tried, creating a new profile in OBS and running the auto-config wizard to prioritize recording specifically seemed to help a bit, but the problem just showed up again in a matter of days anyway. At this point, I'm convinced OBS just might not be well-optimized for capture devices period since I've done my fair share of digging on the subject and found no permanent fix. (I also tried making a post about it here and it never got approved for some reason, so replying here is my best bet LOL)