OBS Recording Dropped Frames / Stuttering (FIXED)

imortalXsoul

New Member
Hi All!

I have been trying to find a solution to this problem for a while now.

I stream to twitch and record for youtube.

Rig:

4070Ti Super
Ryzen 9 5900X
32GB Ram 3600Mhz (C18)
Primary M.2 - Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB
Secondary M.2 - Crucial P3 1TB

--

I was having issues with either dropped or duplicated frames no matter what the bit rate was set to, encoder, rate control or preset. Sometimes it would record fine, others, I would see micro stutters and other times the stutter lasted about 10 seconds and then went away.

I tried EVERY solution in the book from OBS admin, enabling/disabling g sync, removing programs, forcing high priority via regedit, high priority within OBS, performance mode, using one monitor instead of two, capping my games FPS to 60, minimising OBS while recording, updating drivers/windows, recording at 59.94fps, disabling all sources that aren't visible in the active scene, increasing shader cache size to 100GB/Unlimited, clearing shader cache... etc. Pretty much all solutions online, i tried, to inconsistent results.

Note that I use Nvidia NVENC H.264 as the encoder.

Today, I tried some things which contributed to consistently smooth recordings even at VERY high bit rates. We're talking 145 br according to the recording file properties. (CQP 18, Preset 6 Slower) I record primarily tekken 8, which is a very fast paced fighting game with effects all over the screen, which is why QCP needed to use that much bit rate in the first place.

Settings that I THINK fixed the issue:

1: Deleting the game capture source and re-adding it as a new source.
2: Limiting the CAPTURE framerate.
3: I enabled "Use anti-cheat compatibility hook" even though Tekken 8 was recognised with or without it being checked. (I don't know if this did anything)
4: Using V-Sync in game. That might not be ideal for FPS games, but for the type of recording I do, I'm not playing live online matches while recording, I use shadowplay for that if needed, so latency isn't really that big of a deal when recording with OBS.

I don't know which of these three settings cleared up the stuttering and it could have been a combination of any of them but it's worth a try.

Thanks!
 
Last edited:

imortalXsoul

New Member
Another thing to mention is to play around with what drive you're recording to. My OBS is installed on my C drive (M.2) and the recordings are noticeably smoother than recording to my secondary M.2 drive (B drive) for some reason even though the read and write speeds are pretty similar. Maybe OBS plays nicer with recording to the same drive that it's installed on... I don't know for sure. Again, try these solutions if nothing else works :D
 

rockbottom

Active Member
Yep, no DRAM on the Crucial P3. Sustained writes are dreadful. A good old HDD (Rust) would put that drive to shame.

1712761961031.png
 
Last edited:

imortalXsoul

New Member
Yep, no DRAM on the Crucial P3. Sustained writes are dreadful. A good old HDD (Rust) would put that drive to shame.

View attachment 103178
This makes sense. The samsung drive performs much better which coincides with the graph. Any recommendations for a secondary drive for excellent recording performance? Recording to my C drive is not exactly ideal, but I'll deal with it for now...
 

rockbottom

Active Member
I only use & recommend "Pro" drives. Almost all of them have DRAM & are designed to be hammered non-stop. I have (3) 980 Pros in my current rig.
 

Lawrence_SoCal

Active Member
For me, I have a large HDD for archiving. That Crucial P3 SSD is fine for smaller file editing (example word, spreadsheet, etc), but with larger, sustained write file, use main drive, then move to other drive for archiving. I record to C: SSD, then move to HDD when appropriate (and I'd move file back to performant drive if I were to want to real-time edit that file), or get a better SSD drive as rockbottom suggests
Lesson that should be learned - not all SSDs perform the same (just as in the old days 5200 vs7200 vs 10,000 RPM (Raptor) HDDs performed differently)... use the right drive for a given workload
 

rockbottom

Active Member
Cool! That was a good deal. Since it's Gen 4 & I believe your mobo/CPU are as well, I would make it my OS drive as it's quite a bit more robust that the Gen 3 EVO +.
 
Top