Question / Help Recording Is Lagging Out / Choppy (VR Recording For Youtube)

[Deimosnight]

Hi all,

So I've been having issues setting up OBS to record clean, quality videos of my Oculus VR gameplay that I can upload to Youtube. So far I've tried recording games like Township Tale, Vivecraft, VR Chat, etc. without any success. I can't tell if it is my computer that is struggling to run all the software simultaneously (i.e. OBS, Audacity, Oculus, and whatever game I'm currently playing) or if it is my OBS settings that are the problem. When I'm playing the game it doesn't seem as laggy as is when viewing the video recording afterward.
I built my own PC about 4 years ago (although I required a lot of help from my tech-savvy friends on which components to buy), and I don't think it's the hardware that is the problem, but I'm not certain. I've been experimenting with lots of different OBS settings based on other forums I've read but now I'm just confused about how to get the best quality video given my system and I'm sure they're thoroughly jacked up now.

I tried to include a short segment of recorded gameplay from OBS which has been clipped and exported using HitFilm Express with the export settings at 1920 x 1080 @ 30 FPS with the 'YouTube 1080p HD' preset, but I couldn't get the clip to attach to this post.
The lagginess seems to happen every time I play a game and begin recording no matter what my OBS settings are (30fps/60fps, whichever encoder, etc.) Also, the lag oftentimes gets worse in heavily populated servers in games like VR Chat or in visually busy/complex areas.

I was wondering if I could get some advice on changing settings, possibly making some upgrades to my PC, etc. to make the recording process cleaner and easier.
I've included my current settings below and attached a document of my OBS log when trying to record my last game session. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Computer Hardware:
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4460 CPU @ 3.20GHz Quad-Core
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z97-HD3 ATX LGA1150
Installed RAM: 16.0 GB (4x4 GB) Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1866
Display Adapters: MSI AMD Radeon R9 200 Series 4GB TWIN FROZR
Intel(R) HD Graphics 4600
Power Supply: EVGA SuperNOVA NEX 650 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX
Window Version: Windows 10 Home v. 1903
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1 TB 3.5” 7200RPM
Mushkin Reactor 512 GB 2.5” SSD
Storage Utilization: Local Disk (C:) 190 GB free of 476
New Volume (B:) 930 GB free of 931
External Hard Drive (G:) 858 GB free of 930 GB

Oculus VR Settings:
Model: Oculus Rift S
Anti-aliasing: Turned On
High-Quality Panel Rendering: Turned On

OBS Settings:
Output:
Streaming:
Video Bitrate: 2500 Kbps
Encoder: Software (x264)
Audio Bitrate: 192

Recording:
Recording Quality: Indistinguishable Quality, Large File Size
Recording Format: MP4
Encoder: Software (x264)

Video:
Base (Canvas) Resolution: 1920x1080
Output (Scaled) Resolution: 1280x720
Downscale Filter: Bicubic (Sharpened scaling, 16 samples)
Common FPS Values: 30

Advanced:
Video:
Renderer: Direct3D 11
Color Format: NV12
Color Space: 601
Color Range: Partial

 

[koala]

17:12:27.381: Output 'simple_file_output': Number of lagged frames due to rendering lag/stalls: 4405 (2.0%) 17:12:27.381: ==== Recording Stop ================================================ 17:12:27.383: Video stopped, number of skipped frames due to encoding lag: 87023/220595 (39.4%)
Your CPU is severely overloaded with encoding the video, and your GPU is overloaded a bit.
You should have Quicksync (QSV) available as encoder - try Quicksync instead of x264. This hardware encoder will free your CPU from encoding.