OBS locks my main PC to 60Hz.

[da_gluon_soup]

Here's the setup I have right now: My gaming rig has two wires coming out of the GPU. One is a displayport which goes to my main monitor (1440p 144hz) and the other cable (HDMI) goes to a capture card which is connected to my laptop (1080p 144hz).

The problem is when I duplicate the display on the main monitor to capture on OBS installed on the laptop, my resolution and frame rate take a hit. I can change the resolution, but I am locked to 60hz on my main monitor. I'm pretty new to OBS, is there anything in the settings I can tinker with?

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

Not a scenario I deal with, so good luck in getting a more targetted reply

One - don't ignore Operating System and GPU driver impact on using Operating System level 'duplicate display'

Personally, due to frequent reports of issues with low quality capture 'cards (USB adapters), I'd be inclined to get a quality capture device that can easily handle you main monitor desired output, and I'd probably go for a 2160p (4K) just to be on safe side (and future proof to some extent my purchase)

 

[AaronD]

due to frequent reports of issues with low quality capture 'cards (USB adapters)

A lot (maybe all?) of the cheap USB captures are deceptively marketed at best. Often outright lies.

A common one is to have a USB 3 connector and hype it all up...when there's actually a USB 2 chip behind it! The USB 3 pins are not even hooked up! But they're there!

So you can't easily claim that it's USB 2 when it's "clearly" USB 3 "just by looking at it". But the computer knows, and will tell you if you know how to ask and where to look.

Of course, you can't cram HD video through USB 2 without absolutely squashing it first, and so that's what happens...in the card! Before the computer or OBS even has a chance at it! And it uses a dirt cheap (both licensing and processing power) and horrendously inefficient method - MJPEG - so the resulting quality is even worse than it technically *could* be given the available bitrate.
(but you do get HD dimensions all the way through it, so you can't claim that it doesn't do that...it just doesn't look all that great)

I've also seen random latency. No idea how THAT happens, but my array of 4 cheap USB captures (before I knew the above and replaced them with a 4-input PCIe card) were always out of sync *with each other*, and by differing amounts and directions each time! Good luck chasing THAT with Sync Delays!

The single PCIe card fixed everything! Good picture, equal latency, and less latency than the USB ones ever had.

 

[prgmitchell]

Here's the setup I have right now: My gaming rig has two wires coming out of the GPU. One is a displayport which goes to my main monitor (1440p 144hz) and the other cable (HDMI) goes to a capture card which is connected to my laptop (1080p 144hz).

The problem is when I duplicate the display on the main monitor to capture on OBS installed on the laptop, my resolution and frame rate take a hit. I can change the resolution, but I am locked to 60hz on my main monitor. I'm pretty new to OBS, is there anything in the settings I can tinker with?

This isn't really anything that would be configured inside of OBS. When you duplicate a display in your windows graphics settings you should be able to set different refresh rates for your monitor and the duplicated video to the capture card.