Question / Help OBS Recording/Streaming causing FPS drops

[n8cwhite]

I'm on a late 2017 MacBook Air. QuickTime Player is stuck giving me black bars around videos, so I went for OBS. I was able to play on QuickTime at around 40 FPS, which is honestly just OK with me. I expected similar results (maybe even slightly lower, at 30 FPS) with OBS, however whenever I record/stream it absolutely slaughters my frames, to the point where I'm parkouring from 40 to 3 to 17 to 21. Is there any way to fix this?


Specs if anyone needs them:
Sierra 10.12.6
Late 2017 MacBook Air
8GB RAM
Intel i5-5350U
Display is 1440x900
Intel HD 6000 Graphics.

https://obsproject.com/logs/sXGJXcAHM9ucT3uv

 

[Narcogen]

"QuickTime Player is stuck giving me black bars around videos, so I went for OBS"

Can you expand on this a bit? OBS isn't intended to be a media player, so I'm not sure what you mean when you say you're using OBS because QuickTime player is doing letter and/or pillarboxing.

OBS is a video switcher/compositor. It uses GPU resources do do this. If the task you're running is also GPU-intensive, seeing FPS reductions is not unexpected, and the MacBook Air is not suited for streaming at all.

 

[n8cwhite]

Can you expand on this a bit? OBS isn't intended to be a media player, so I'm not sure what you mean when you say you're using OBS because QuickTime player is doing letter and/or pillarboxing.

OBS is a video switcher/compositor. It uses GPU resources do do this. If the task you're running is also GPU-intensive, seeing FPS reductions is not unexpected, and the MacBook Air is not suited for streaming at all.

QuickTime comes in with a built-in record feature, similar to OBS. QuickTime was giving me black bars around videos when I was recording, therefore I went to go download OBS to use. I didn't expect or require to be recording/streaming at 60fps god mode, but I was slightly hoping that it would be half-decent, at maybe 25-30 frames. I'm curious if there's any possible way I can give make sure my frames while I'm recording a video aren't being slaughtered.

 

[Narcogen]

Yes, reduce your canvas resolution to 1280x720.

21:10:56.120: base resolution: 1440x900
21:10:56.120: output resolution: 1280x720

I can't tell for sure because there's no output session in the log, but I'm guessing you're overloading your GPU and possibly your CPU with encoding. Reducing the base resolution can reduce both.