Recommended recording settings? (Specs in post)

[Two-Tu]

Hi!

I am having a replay buffer, which I have set for 20 minutes. I am the buffer to capture moments spontaneously. The 20 minutes are necessary as there often whole matches I want to record impromptuly.

When "recording" however, my FPS drops significantly by up to 10 FPS. Which settings should I use?

Specs

• Windows 10 (64-Bit)
• Radeon RX580
• Ryzen 3600
• 16GB DDR4 RAM
• SSD

Current Settings

Spoiler: My Settings

Thanks in advance!

 

[FerretBomb]

It would likely be better to simply record to disk, and set timestamps for events you want to edit into smaller clips. If there are none for a given session, simply delete the session at the end of the recording. The replay buffer will use a significant amount of system memory for a 20-minute session... far more than 512MB. Likely closer to 10GB or so.

Advise the same settings for any recording session. Use CQP/CRF rather than CBR, preferably with a cqp value of 16-22 (lower being better quality, but larger files). AMD's AMF is absolutely awful, but CQP/CRF should be able to compensate by automatically using more bitrate as-needed to maintain a given image quality level.
Unfortunately, AMF is not a separate part of the core (as NVENC is) so will cause in-game performance degradation. If you are recording locally, software x264 (or x264 low-cpu) may be needed. The best option would be to switch to an nVidia-based card, so NVENC could be used.

Finally, recording to MP4/MOV is absolutely never advised. Record to MKV if you need multi-track audio, or FLV if you do not, and remux the recordings at the end. MP4/MOV are NOT recording-safe formats, and many editors have severe issues with mp4/mov files recorded directly by OBS anyway.

 

[Two-Tu]

@FerretBomb

Thank you!

So I have been switching up following things:

Recording Format: mov --> mkv
Rate Control Method: Constant Bitrate --> Constant QP
I-Frame-QP & P-Frame-QP: 18 each

My OBS is installed on a seperate HDD, which is at the given moment solely dedicated to OBS as there are absolutely no other programs installed on it.
How much GB/MB of RAM shall I assign to the replay buffer for a 20 minute session?

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

My OBS is installed on a seperate HDD, which is at the given moment solely dedicated to OBS as there are absolutely no other programs installed on it.

Uh, ok, but that seems odd (if truly HDD, not SSD). Understand it is all about Disk I/O and throughput. There typically isn't all that much Disk I/O associated with the Application (though I switched to SSDs over a decade ago, so my perspective may be skewed). Now, a place to be attentive to disk traffic would be where you save your recordings. For reference on a recent 8c/16t CPU, with an NVMe SSD, having the OS, OBS, and recording at 1080p 30fps all to save drive is a non-issue [after a streaming session, I move content to a larger HDD for archiving] ... ymwv depending on your setup. If it is HDD, not SSDs that you have, an old-school HDD rule of thumb (which served me well) would be to have OS and apps on C:\, and if you have a spare drive, re-direct temp/pagefile, and certain other Disk I/O traffic to that other drive. what exactly to point /redirect to extra disk spindles depends on your specific Disk I/O traffic patterns (with things like pagefile traffic being impacted by RAM usage).... it depends..

 

[Two-Tu]

Uh, ok, but that seems odd (if truly HDD, not SSD). Understand it is all about Disk I/O and throughput. There typically isn't all that much Disk I/O associated with the Application (though I switched to SSDs over a decade ago, so my perspective may be skewed). Now, a place to be attentive to disk traffic would be where you save your recordings. For reference on a recent 8c/16t CPU, with an NVMe SSD, having the OS, OBS, and recording at 1080p 30fps all to save drive is a non-issue [after a streaming session, I move content to a larger HDD for archiving] ... ymwv depending on your setup. If it is HDD, not SSDs that you have, an old-school HDD rule of thumb (which served me well) would be to have OS and apps on C:\, and if you have a spare drive, re-direct temp/pagefile, and certain other Disk I/O traffic to that other drive. what exactly to point /redirect to extra disk spindles depends on your specific Disk I/O traffic patterns (with things like pagefile traffic being impacted by RAM usage).... it depends..

Sorry, I am not that tech-savvy.

My D:/ drive is my HDD. As you can see on my pictures attached to the original post, I am saving my recordings directly onto "D:/OBS Replays". The HDD has been formatted prior to installing OBS.
It's 100% clean and literally the only application installed on it, is OBS. So there are exactly 2 folders on the HDD: The OBS client and the folder where my recordings are being saved into.

The temp files and logs, however, are being written onto my C:/ drive (AppData > Roaming), which is my SSD. On that SSD, my OS and all the programs have been installed.