Question / Help OBS not recording at 60fps even with a frame rate cap on most of my games!

[Vokun Plays]

Hi! I've been having this issue recently with OBS where right when I hit the record or stream button and start capturing game play my captured frames drop from 60 to sometimes at the lowest 20 and it just bounces all over between those two on basically all my games. And sometimes even capping the frame rate like in Rainbow Six Siege it doesn't help at all. I did notice however that when I look at my task manager it says 90 to 85% of my GPU is being used at all times and OBS is only taking at most 12% or less. I had to cap my frame rate on all my games which I've never had to do before just to record or stream at consistent frames.

My rig:
Processor: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1920X 12-Core Processor (24 CPUs), ~3.5GHz
Memory: 32768MB RAM
Gigabyte GTX 1080 x2 (SLI on or off doesn't help me at all in fact most of my games preform worse)
And OBS is installed on an SSD with plenty of space for things and the videos go to my hard drive because it has 3TBs to use. And below are some files I pulled from OBS when I was playing with some settings to see if I could fix it in any way shape or form. Please help me.

 

[Vokun Plays]

Can anyone help me with this at all? Please I need some advice on this. I never had to cap my frame rate before to record and play. Now all of the sudden I do?!

 

[DEDRICK]

You've done all the usual Windows 10 Tweaks other than launching OBS as Admin

Open up the stats panel(View/Stats) to keep track of your Lagged Frames and FPS

Remove the Desktop Capture, Elgato and C922 from your gaming scene, test Rainbow 6
Add the webcam back in, test again. (Webcam format, resolution and FPS does have an impact on Rendering Latency, you can watch this is the Stats panel.)
Avoid running desktop and game capture in the same scene, create separate scenes for this.

Make sure the Elgato Source is disabled when you aren't using it.

Keep the Elgato and Webcam on different USB Hubs if possible. I see you have a Vive as well, you could be choking your USB bandwidth if the Elgato, Webcam and any of the sensors/headset are running along the same channel. USB bandwidth is a huge issue with Oculus and Vive, each sensor and the headset itself should be running on dedicated 3.0 channel.

When you run too much data over a single USB hub it can cause major issues with any connected devices, drops outs etc.

 

[Narcogen]

01:25:55.097: Output 'adv_file_output': Number of lagged frames due to rendering lag/stalls: 21078 (38.9%)

You are overloading your GPU.

You're already realized that SLI doesn't help, and you're right.

You need to cap your in-game framerate to keep load on 1 GPU below 90-95%. If that isn't enough you could stream at 720p60 or 1080p30 instead.

 

[Vokun Plays]

01:25:55.097: Output 'adv_file_output': Number of lagged frames due to rendering lag/stalls: 21078 (38.9%)

You are overloading your GPU.

You're already realized that SLI doesn't help, and you're right.

You need to cap your in-game framerate to keep load on 1 GPU below 90-95%. If that isn't enough you could stream at 720p60 or 1080p30 instead.

So I've tried capping the frame rate before and it does work for most if not all my games but with R6 Siege the game still some how pushes over 100 FPS while in game but in menu it uses my 60 that I set it to. And the game still even with graphics lowered and turning off my webcam etc. The game still uses almost 100% of my GPU with OBS recording.

 

[Vokun Plays]

Also other recording like Action! and Shadowplay have no issues recording under load at all because they do the bulk of the encoding with my second GPU. Even with the game over 60fps and maxed out settings. But OBS and Xsplit are the only ones I had issues with. But sadly these programs are not as streamer friendly due to the lack of options and customizing that OBS has. Here's the log for when I capped my frame rate in the game. (The game still used 98% of my GPU at all times)

 

[Osiris]

There were barely any lagged frames in that log, only 0.1%.
Also OBS and Xsplit have to do scaling, compositing, running filters on the GPU. Programs like Action! and Shadowplay do not have to do any of that, because of their limited options.

 

[Vokun Plays]

So is there anything I can try that would solve this issue that doesn't involve capping my FPS to 60 and lowering my graphics till the game looks like a potato? Because that's what I have been having to do with most of my high end graphic games like No Man's Sky, R6 Siege, Escape from tarkov, etc. And I've never had this issue before I installed the newest windows version and installed the newest OBS version. Even Streamlabs OBS does it now when it didn't before.

 

[Vokun Plays]

You've done all the usual Windows 10 Tweaks other than launching OBS as Admin

Open up the stats panel(View/Stats) to keep track of your Lagged Frames and FPS

Remove the Desktop Capture, Elgato and C922 from your gaming scene, test Rainbow 6
Add the webcam back in, test again. (Webcam format, resolution and FPS does have an impact on Rendering Latency, you can watch this is the Stats panel.)
Avoid running desktop and game capture in the same scene, create separate scenes for this.

Make sure the Elgato Source is disabled when you aren't using it.

Keep the Elgato and Webcam on different USB Hubs if possible. I see you have a Vive as well, you could be choking your USB bandwidth if the Elgato, Webcam and any of the sensors/headset are running along the same channel. USB bandwidth is a huge issue with Oculus and Vive, each sensor and the headset itself should be running on dedicated 3.0 channel.

When you run too much data over a single USB hub it can cause major issues with any connected devices, drops outs etc.

I've done all of these steps and it didn't help much if at all. Like I've said I've never had this issue before. Lowering my graphics helps obviously but with two Gigabyte 1080s and all the ram I need with my threadripper I shouldn't be having to do this. So I'm trying to find the root of the issue at this point having canceled out it possibly being hardware issues.

 

[Canaldopapaco]

Well, I'll try to report the problem I'm experiencing! Because I think it's similar to yours

I've been having serious problems with my broadcasts for a few days now. When I open SLOBS (or even other broadcast programs - OBS, LIghhtstream ...) I'm having a big loss of fps in game and especially in the transmission.

The point is that I have a machine with high performance, and alternatives like activate vsync or limit the use of gpu in the games does not make sense since a few days everything was everything normal and no configuration change was made.

I've also done internet connection tests, updating the drivers, testing configs on SLOBS but nothing works.


What I've noticed is that there are other people with the same problem and this is happening in a totally random way.

I wonder if anyone knows what the problem might be.


PC CONFIG:

Intel Core i7 8700
ASUS for Intel LGA 1151, Rog Strix Z370
Kingston HyperX FURY 2X8GB 2400Mhz DDR4
ASUS GeForce GTX1070TI Rog-Strix
HyperX Fury 120Gb
HD: 1Tb
I sat 850w Gold Plus

 

[Vokun Plays]

Well, I'll try to report the problem I'm experiencing! Because I think it's similar to yours

I've been having serious problems with my broadcasts for a few days now. When I open SLOBS (or even other broadcast programs - OBS, LIghhtstream ...) I'm having a big loss of fps in game and especially in the transmission.

The point is that I have a machine with high performance, and alternatives like activate vsync or limit the use of gpu in the games does not make sense since a few days everything was everything normal and no configuration change was made.

I've also done internet connection tests, updating the drivers, testing configs on SLOBS but nothing works.


What I've noticed is that there are other people with the same problem and this is happening in a totally random way.

I wonder if anyone knows what the problem might be.


PC CONFIG:

Intel Core i7 8700
ASUS for Intel LGA 1151, Rog Strix Z370
Kingston HyperX FURY 2X8GB 2400Mhz DDR4
ASUS GeForce GTX1070TI Rog-Strix
HyperX Fury 120Gb
HD: 1Tb
I sat 850w Gold Plus

Are you running on the newest version of Windows 10? I’m starting to think it’s a windows issue maybe.

 

[Jose Tortola]

What NVIDIA Driver are you using?.

As far as I know, the latest ones (417.01) do some kind of a fix to some stutter problems while streaming that were introduced some drivers ago.

By the way, streaming with SLI is a nightmare. OBS takes what it needs to capture the game from only one of your graphic cards, so in your stream you will lost half of the frames you're viewing in your screen.

You can try to capture all those frames with OBS by activating "SLI compatibility mode" in the game capture source. But it results in a less efficent game capture as then OBS has to download what it need to capture from VRAM of both graphic cards to RAM. And it can result in your PCIe lanes overloaded with that extra workload and stutter in your stream and frame drops in your game.

The only good option for streaming and using SLI seems to be a dual-PC setup and use a dedicate streaming PC with a capture card.

 

[Vokun Plays]

What NVIDIA Driver are you using?.

As far as I know, the latest ones (417.01) do some kind of a fix to some stutter problems while streaming that were introduced some drivers ago.

By the way, streaming with SLI is a nightmare. OBS takes what it needs to capture the game from only one of your graphic cards, so in your stream you will lost half of the frames you're viewing in your screen.

You can try to capture all those frames with OBS by activating "SLI compatibility mode" in the game capture source. But it results in a less efficent game capture as then OBS has to download what it need to capture from VRAM of both graphic cards to RAM. And it can result in your PCIe lanes overloaded with that extra workload and stutter in your stream and frame drops in your game.

The only good option for streaming and using SLI seems to be a dual-PC setup and use a dedicate streaming PC with a capture card.

I’m using the latest driver version and I have tried with SLI on and off and even used a friends 1080ti with the same result of the GPU being used over 90% in most games.