OBS makes my PC struggle A LOT, am I doing something wrong?

[dururingo]

Basically title, I run most games just fine but my PC's performance takes a BIG hit once I fire up OBS and press that Start Streaming button. Is it really because my PC isn't powerful enough to stream even older games (like Dark Souls 3, which came out 5 years ago) even at 720p? Maybe I have like a certain setting a bit too high or something that I'm not seeing. Do you guys mind taking a look?

i7 6700K @ 4.0GHz
NVIDIA RTX 2060 6GB (recently upgraded from GTX 1060 3GB. I thought my problem was that I didn't have enough VRAM to encode and play at the same time. Very minimal improvement)
16GB DDR4

Log: https://obsproject.com/logs/HMi5QKrfMjlGmj-n

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

Have you tried OBS without that atrocious StreamElements plug-in, and at 30fps?
And no, your CPU isn't too old, BUT you are asking OBS to do color correction, audio effects and other CPU intensive stuff
And hopefully you know streaming over WiFi can have all kinds of its own challenges (never recommended), though probably unrelated to performance hit you are asking about

Though
14:49:23.081: Output 'adv_stream': Number of lagged frames due to rendering lag/stalls: 2 (0.0%)
14:49:23.082: Video stopped, number of skipped frames due to encoding lag: 2/133559 (0.0%)

So, 1 - real-time video encoding is VERY computationally demanding. And your OBS settings aren't helping, and neither is that plugin
I recommend monitoring hardware resource (CPU, GPU, RAM, 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 in your case, I suspect the GPU is fine, but CPU is maxed out)

And I'm not a gamer, so take that into account. I'm wondering if game (window/display) capture settings are also an issue on your system?? Sorry, not my area so I can't advise
But I suspect you've read up /watched videos on fantastic OBS settings for a CPU that is many times more powerful than yours
I suspect the challenge will be figuring out which Effects settings you need to remove to get your CPU down to a reasonable utilization level

 

[dururingo]

Thank you for your response! I'm using StreamElements' "OBS.Live" and I find it to be too comfortable to go back to regular OBS Studio. Good to know it's demanding, though. Will probably look for some other, more efficient way to stream in the future.

I usually don't stream over WiFi, I only did it in that particular test. Audio is very important for me, so I'm willing to sacrifice some performance in exchange for quality in audio capture specifically.

I'm not exactly sure how I'm making OBS do color correction and other video-related stuff, it's probably some default setting that I don't want. Can you please tell me how to tone those down?

Also, I'm encoding using NVENC and capturing the game with OBS' "Game capture" function.

 

[deFrisselle]

Never put Multiple Captures in a Scene, like Game and Display capture, they can interfere with each other
Same with multiple Game captures

Analyzer | OBS

OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) is free and open source software for video recording and live streaming. Stream to Twitch, YouTube and many other providers or record your own videos with high quality H264 / AAC encoding.

obsproject.com

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

Again, I'm not a gamer, so I have 0 use for OBS.Live. But there have been conversations in this forum on alternatives that are better written, so I'd recommend doing a little research
As for the OBS Audio and Video effects - none are default. You either imported the settings from someone else, or you did set it. YOu can see what is set by review your own log (other than StreamElements puking all over the log) it is fairly readable and you'll see what filters and effects are set per scene and source

 

[dururingo]

Right. I will try and delete all "Game capture" and "Display capture" instances that I'm not using and remove those settings that I guess I did import a while ago. Thank you!