recommended settings for low end pc ? (frame drops, lag spikes, lag)

alexYs

New Member
I mainly record medium-low graphic video games and my settings aren't really that great as lag spikes/frame drops r pretty common. Any ideas to mitigate this?

GPU: nvidia geforce gt 1030

CPU: intel i5-10400

RAM: 16gb ddr4
 

PaiSand

Active Member
Best way is to run the Auto-configuration Wizard and apply the settings it gives.

 

alexYs

New Member
Best way is to run the Auto-configuration Wizard and apply the settings it gives.

that's my bad - sorry! and thank you very much! https://obsproject.com/logs/Bp6s9zY3OIDnpUBI
 

Lawrence_SoCal

Active Member
Also, be aware that no amount of single app (OBS Studio) settings advice can take into account what else you have running on that computer. Over time (decades), default Windows OS is running more and more in the background. And some poorly written apps (including Microsoft) think preloading their bloatware to enable quicker startup is desirable degenerates. Anyway... point being... it is up to you to look into what services (OS native and whatever has been installed) and adjust accordingly. And turning off OS eye-candy, maybe, depending on performance impact.
Learning real-time hardware resource monitoring is always useful. Make sure you don't have something like a Disk I/O, RAM, etc bottleneck

Lots of threads on OS optimization for under-powered hardware. but it is more art than science due to different users needs and priorities
 
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qhobbes

Active Member
1. Run OBS as Admin.
2. Browser hardware acceleration is currently disabled. Enabling acceleration is highly recommended due to the improvements to performance and significantly lower CPU usage for browser sources (if you have them). This can be enabled in Settings -> Advanced.
3. Record to MKV. If you record to MP4 and the recording is interrupted, the file will be corrupted and unrecoverable.

If you require MP4 files for some other purpose like editing, remux them afterwards by selecting File > Remux Recordings in the main OBS Studio window.
4. Display (and possibly Window Capture) and Game Capture Sources interfere with each other. NEVER put them in the same scene.
5. Do not use the zerolatency x264 Tune for recording.
 

alexYs

New Member
1. Run OBS as Admin.
2. Browser hardware acceleration is currently disabled. Enabling acceleration is highly recommended due to the improvements to performance and significantly lower CPU usage for browser sources (if you have them). This can be enabled in Settings -> Advanced.
3. Record to MKV. If you record to MP4 and the recording is interrupted, the file will be corrupted and unrecoverable.

If you require MP4 files for some other purpose like editing, remux them afterwards by selecting File > Remux Recordings in the main OBS Studio window.
4. Display (and possibly Window Capture) and Game Capture Sources interfere with each other. NEVER put them in the same scene.
5. Do not use the zerolatency x264 Tune for recording.
this is really helpful, appreciate this a ton!
quick questions though: i've just separated my display capture and my game capture between two different scenes, will that cause any impact or is it better for optimization? - what would be a better alternative than zerolatency, or should i just disable it?
 

qhobbes

Active Member
It's better for optimization because they interfere with each other. I don't know the technical details behind it but maybe being something with it directly capturing the DirectX or OpenGL source. You can't Game Capture Notepad. You should only use Display Capture as a last resort or if you need to capture Windows stuff such as the desktop and start menu. OBS renders all the scenes in a scene collection at the same time so there's no lag when switching scenes. The more scenes and more stuff in those scenes, the more resources OBS is going to use that could be going to your game.

zerolatency is for streaming so a better alternative than zerolatency is (None) or fastdecode, but only if you are having issues watching the original on your computer. If you are editing your videos on your computer and decide to use fastdecode, do a short test to make sure they open in your video editor.
 
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