Question / Help Preview has suddenly started lagging, even when not streaming/recording

[CreeCyan]

Hi guys,

This problem has started recently, just noticed it being very severe during Hellblade playthrough. The preview lags massively, down to like low 30 fps from the set 60 fps. The GPU doesn't seem to be struggling with the game much. But as soon as the game starts the preview just dips down into low fps. If I stream, the low preview fps show up on stream. Everything lags, dono animations, follow animations etc.

Tried running as admin, no change. Even idling in the Hellblade menu dips the preview down to 50 fps or so. CPU usage showing 6%. And frames are like over 200 fps, there is almost nothing happening in the menu, and yet OBS starts lagging. Even if I remove the game capture completely (!) and leave just a background image into OBS preview, and then continue running the game, the frame indicator for the preview will still drop to 30 fps territory... What's happening?

If I change the game to windowed mode so I can move it around the desktop I can achieve this result: if the game is running in the foreground, OBS preview lags, if the focus is away from the game window (it's still rendering in full, visible on the screen, I just click on the OBS window to make that the active window (or any other window for that matter) then OBS goes back to 60 fps. So it doesn't seem to be a performance issue to me. Hasn't been an issue before.

Stats say frames are being missed due to rendering lag. How come it wasn't happening before? Could it be that the new NVIDIA drivers messed something up? W10 update?

 

[CreeCyan]

Has anyone experienced anything similar?

 

[OG See OH Zee]

You're experiencing a video card overload which OBS needs some spare GPU power to run well. Also note that Hellblade is using the latest Unreal Engine 4 which is notorious for using all GPU even if you cap the framerate/use Vsync. much like PUBG had. Had a GTX 1060 on that game and played on minimal settings with screen scale to 70%, and OBS still has the audacity to dip the FPS even with low GPU usage. Game Mode was off the whole time too.

UPDATE: You need to post a log with a recording attempt anyways since submitting a log without any stream/recording attempts will make it incomplete.

 

[CreeCyan]

I've added a log with a short recording. I can see that the message in the log tells the same story, and probably confirms what you're saying: Number of lagged frames due to rendering lag/stalls: 683 (31.5%). And, even though the game was running close to 90 fps most of the time, with no problems, OBS lagged massively. I downloaded MSI Afterburner to check the GPU usage, and you're right - it's at 99% all the time, no matter what the frames and settings in the game. Is that a bug in the U4 engine, can devs fix that?

And the main question - is throwing more power at the problem going to help? If I go for 1080Ti, would I be less likely to run into this issue?

 

[NotVulcan]

I've got the exact same issue, When i have studio mode (the two displays on) i get locked to 8fps, then when i change to the single display mode, it's straight back up to 60fps. I've got a 1700x @4Ghz and a 1080ti, so specs aren't a problem, I'd assume just an obs bug, and might get fixed over time, or maybe reinstalling obs/drivers may fix it, I personally haven't been too worried to reinstall everything. But if it persists then i might have to

Hope this helped a little

 

[CreeCyan]

I've got the exact same issue, When i have studio mode (the two displays on) i get locked to 8fps, then when i change to the single display mode, it's straight back up to 60fps. I've got a 1700x @4Ghz and a 1080ti, so specs aren't a problem, I'd assume just an obs bug, and might get fixed over time, or maybe reinstalling obs/drivers may fix it, I personally haven't been too worried to reinstall everything. But if it persists then i might have to

Hope this helped a little

Not sure if it's the same issue. It's not when in studio mode with two displays on (I actually never use it), just when the preview is showing. You gave me an idea, though - what if I try recording with the OBS preview minimised...

 

[OG See OH Zee]

Not going to do much if at all. Just limit the GPU usage by capping the framerate or use vsync. If it still persists, post an updated log with another recording session.

 

[CreeCyan]

Not going to do much if at all. Just limit the GPU usage by capping the frame rate or use vsync. If it still persists, post an updated log with another recording session.

What are you referring to when you say "not much"? The new graphics card? So is it an Unreal 4 engine issue that always will be there unless I cap frames?

 

[CreeCyan]

For anyone interested - I found a solution. Capping Hellblade's frames to 60 using Nvidia Profile Inspector helped free up resources for OBS rendering. OBS really needs just a little. If GPU usage is up to 98% OBS has no problems.

That said, Hellblade is a strange game. It doesn't boost the card clock until last moment when usage is almost 100%. Could it be some sort of an Unreal 4 engine power saving features? Don't know, but it seems to me that if it was boosting to max straight away we might have more headroom for OBS. So I changed the power management mode in the Nvidia Control Panel to Maximum Performance and, lo and behold, the game boosts the clock, GPU usage is down to 60%! I can now increase the graphics settings, enjoy a great game at rock solid 60 fps and also stream/record it! :)

 

[Tauwer]

Anyone who is still having this problem, i tried running pubg fullscreen (windowed) and that fixed it for me.

 

[kangaroofist57]

hey bud. i dont know if you still need help, but try going into task manager and say you are streaming overwatch, right click overwatch then go to details then right click overwatch in the details page then go to set affinity. now i dont know how many cores will show up for you but try reducing the amount of cores the game is using so it reserves some for the obs, because if obs preview is showing frame drops then you are overloading somewhere. start from the highest number then go lower. play with it to see what results fit you. bare in mind tho the more cores you take from the game you will see massive fps drops so try not to take too many. you will have to do this with every game that wants to hog all your cpu cores. let me know how that goes.