Question / Help Poor stuttery performance in Windows 10? Fix inside :)

[raindeeers]

Hello everybody. Anyone using Windows 10 has probably experienced horrible stuttering in their stream when using OBS along with Windows 10 TH2. All you gotta do is run your game(s) in Windows 8 compatibility mode and the poor performance stops dead cold.

How to run games in Windows 8 compatibility mode?
1) Locate your game .exe , right click and select Properties.
2) Click the Compatibility tab, tick "Run this program in compatibility mode for" and select Windows 8.

Does it really work?
Oh yeah, it works! Compare the videos below and see for yourself.

Video 1: Wait for the 20sec mark for trouble to start. In-game is butter smooth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YA3b5n3E_4U

Video 2: Game is now running in Windows 8 compatibility mode with exact same settings. It's like night and day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YYnGC5xe1g

Video 3: GPU encoding (AMD VCE) works again as well. Happy days!
https://youtu.be/GDLPdeyBdRU

Hope this helped somebody out there on the Interwebs :p

 

[Lapppy]

I just tried this, and it didn't seem to fix my issues with game capture.
It might help some other people, though.

 

[raindeeers]

You sure you're doing it correctly?
Grid was fixed for me. So was Mass Effect 2 & 3, Dishonored was fixed as well. Pretty much every single DX9 game was stuttering like crazy.

You could also try Windows 7 compatibility mode. I haven't done so myself yet. Also I use monitor capture since it's so much easier and it performs fantastic in Windows 8 / 10.

 

[Lapppy]

I honestly don't know how to do it the wrong way... lol

The game I tried this with is League of Legends. This game is weird because the client and the game itself are separate from each other, and after every patch the location of the game executable changes. Setting the game exe to Windows 8 compatibility did not improve frame skipping when using game capture.

Monitor capture is amazing in Windows 10... I normally use it when I can, but after a few minutes of recording the frame rate is cut in half.... even when simply recording the desktop.
I haven't tried monitor capture with Windows 8 mode yet, but from my experience the frame skips in monitor capture are a system level problem and might not be affected by setting a compatibility.
Though maybe the DWM reacts differently to apps in Windows 8 mode, which could produce a stutter free capture. I will try this again later.


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EDIT: Setting Windows 8 Compatibility appears to have some sort of an effect when capturing LoL, but it is not good. The game is always captured at 30fps when using Windows 8 mode, and it's not a smooth 30fps, in fact every third or fourth frame is skipped. If I tab out, the desktop is captured at a normal 60fps until I tab back into the game.

Without Windows 8 mode, OBS captures the game at 60fps until Windows says, 'lolno', and then captures at the same 30fps with missing frames for a while.

I don't know how this would effect other games that I have, but I usually don't get any stutters while game capturing those games anyways.