OBS Studio using too much VRAM?

[Kivy]

Hello, I cant find any info on this issue so I'm hoping someone here can help.

Here's a screenshot of my task manager. As you can see my VRAM was almost 100% during the stream, and then I ended the stream, closed OBS, and my VRAM went down by half. The game was still running. I'm also attaching a log which shows nothing wrong. Is it normal for OBS to use 3GB of VRAM? or am I doing something wrong here? I'd like to avoid having to buy a 16GB graphics card when my game barely uses 4GB anyways.

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

 

[Suslik V]

You may take a look at this post (assumption that AMD HW encoding uses too much VRAM because it is running by default outside of OBS or in other way related to HW encoder in use): https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/obs-31-is-crashing-and-unusable.182484/post-678103

Edit: also, you running 3 additional streaming encoders (all at different resolutions), so VRAM consumption should increase.

 

[Kivy]

Update: I formatted and did a fresh re-install of Windows 11, never even installed the AMD Adrenalin software, and OBS is still using 4GB of Vram...

I cant even stream Oblivion Remaster because the game was made to use 8GB of Vram but with OBS using an extra 3GB, my game just crashes.

Here's a 4h stream I did today on a fresh OBS install:

https://obsproject.com/logs/RwSen4o0Si6ohWrm

This is a screenshot of task manager right after i ended the stream, showing a dip of 2-3GB in vram usage:

I get that I'm running 5 encodes at the same time but using up that much vram just to encode video sounds like a performance issue imo, especially with how nvidia and amd are still selling brand new gpus with only 8gb of vram, and that's not even enough to run some of the newer games - without streaming them.

 

[Suslik V]

You always can run single source test recording without multi-resolution to see how much resources it consumes. Each source/filter and each encoder in OBS consumes some resources. Higher resolution -> more resources needed, and so on.