Question / Help performance Issues

[ezrawale1996]

Hi all, having a bit of an issue with performance whilst trying to record game footage locally. My recordings are just a choppy mess, not even 1FPS, and I really do not know why.

I ran the log analyzer and it informed me:

"Low frame rate detected
Your stream is taking an average of 126.238 milliseconds to render a frame. This limits your maximum FPS to around 8 FPS. The most common reason for long frame rendering times are:

Using monitor capture
Using slow devices such as webcams running at 1080p
Not enough CPU/GPU resources available for OBS
Running your stream at too high of a resolution / FPS for your computer to handle

Late frames detected
22.90% of your frames are late. This means the frames are being generated later than they were needed, causing your stream FPS to drop. Late frames are often caused by slow sources such as monitor capture, slow video capture devices or by trying to run your stream at too high of a resolution / FPS.

If you are using a webcam, try to lower the resolution of it. If you are using monitor capture, try switching to game source or window capture. If you must use monitor capture, ensure Aero is disabled.

You can also try lowering the resolution or FPS of your stream if you have an older CPU.

---
I have a beefy CPU (i5-3570k) paired with an ageing GPU (GTS-8800) but surly if I'm getting 60+ FPS whilst playing the GPU cannot be the bottleneck? Running analytic programs showed that whilst capturing my CPU averaged ~60% usage with peaks of 80%. I've spent a while fiddling with various options to try to resolve this but I'm out of ideas.
-Ezra

 

[Gol D. Ace]

Showing us your Logfile here would help for the beginning.

EDIT: Seems like your GPU is clearly the limiting factor here.

GPU download and conversion - [99.7%] [avg time: 125.8 ms] [children: 100%] [unaccounted: -0.572%]

Try reducing the load on the GPU and use a lower resolution.
Getting a newer graphics card would be the best.

 

[ezrawale1996]

Realised my mistake shortly after posting. Now attached

 

[alpinlol]

your cpu is okay for either gaming or streaming/recording ... gaming and streaming/recording gets him into his limits but still 720p@30 would be no problem for your cpu so you got that going ...

the problem here is your gpu, your gpu is actually so bad that you can probably stream/record 480p@30fps probably not even i'd think more of 360p@30 at max

what to do? finally upgrade your gpu since you are running an ivy bridge cpu and still got an gpu from 2007. im sure investing 150 bucks into a cheap r9 270x or the r9 270 wont hurt you at all and this card was actually able to run bf4 at decent settings if you trust benchmarks

i dont try to be rude or mean just giving you your actual choice right away since 1080p is not going to work in anyway

 

[ezrawale1996]

Why was my GPU usage around 40-50% whilst recording if it's the bottleneck? For reference I was playing "Counter-strike: Source" with FPS varying between 140-50 but averaging 70

 

[Gol D. Ace]

The problem is almost certainly your video card. The 260/275 and below have severe issues dealing with a lot of VRAM access, and because OBS does all its scene rendering on the GPU, the card performs particularly bad.

Edit: Let me clarify a bit. The GPU isn't hitting 100%, because it's simply not possible due to the memory controller bottlenecking it. The GPU itself is waiting for the data to be in place before it can actually do anything.

I can't really explain it better than that.

 

[ezrawale1996]

Thank you Gol D. Ace! I was, obviously, oblivious to the roles the GPU took on past the rendering of the game. Could you link me to some helpful resources where I could further read up on the technicalities of it, if you know of any?