Question / Help Rendering Lag on Dual-PC Stream

[FrothyOmen]

Hey all,

I'm having some pretty significant rendering lag on my current streaming setup. I've been trying to self-diagnose for weeks and am at wit's end :(

Gaming PC is running OBS Studio, and using Game Capture. I play in 1440p, 120Hz settings on my XB271HU monitor. In OBS, I use the fullscreen projector feature to project my game capture, along with other OBS sources, to the "fake monitor" of the Elgato HD60 Pro in my Streaming PC. My stream PC outputs 60fps flawlessly and the issue is not on that side, my issue is on the gaming PC side.

When opening the OBS Stats pane, I see that I usually sit somewhere between 1-5% frames missed due to rendering lag, which seems to be a GPU-sided issue. Lowering in-game settings to all low/off, with full 120Hz refresh rate and 1440p resolution does seem to help in some games, but I am still not locked to 60fps on the gaming PC instance of OBS.

Artificially capping my in-game framerates to about 100 does seem to help, but not completely solve the issue. Is my problem truly insufficient GPU power, or is there something within OBS I do not have set correctlyh which is causing me problems?

I have noticed that in games with uncapped framerates, my OBS performance actually worsens when I am in game menus because my GPU is trying to push so many frames from the game. Sorry for not being as well-versed as I could be, but is this maybe some sort of prioritization issue? Is it possible to force my GPU to prioritize minimizing rendering lag in OBS over minimizing rendering lag in-game?

Other applications open during streaming are chrome, spotify, and discord, all of which have hardware acceleration turned OFF wherever possible. Minimizing all these windows before opening my fullscreen game does seem to help, but also not fix my problem. Also, I need chrome and spotify to NOT be minimized so I can actually read my chat and window capture spotify to show the current music playing.

Please find attached a link to my current log file where you can see the hardware of my current PC, as well as a link to results of a Twitch Analyzer test proving that I am maintaining good bitrates and solid FPS on the streaming PC side.

Any ideas, apart from getting a second 1080 or upgrading to a 1080ti? Whenever the Elgato 4k60 comes out, will that alleviate my issues since I can natively push 1440p60 to it without crunching my 1440p120 source down to 1080p60? (Does it even work that way?) Dropping to 1080p on my gaming monitor is not really acceptable for me as an option.

https://gist.github.com/332c7cc5da9886fae5301dba7d52a328
https://r-1.ch/analyzer/results/frothyomentest.4f42df
stream link: https://www.twitch.tv/frothyomen
test stream: https://www.twitch.tv/frothyomentest

 

[Mroczny_Gustaw]

yes it sounds like maxed gpu. start using vsync@60hz and resign from 144/120hz. then maybe 4k will be usable if you monitor gpu load
dont go SLI way, it would add a heap of new probelms

anyway check this list, it may help optimize your setup

1. 60hz desktop refresh
Replace with 59,94 for display like HDMI TV
If you have 144hz monitor its fastest and most reliable to forget about 144hz and follow 1,2,3,4
2. 60 or 30 in OBS (59,94 or 29,97 for HDMI TV)
3. 60 in game if there is switch for it (like bf3, bf4, overwatch) - 59,94 for HDMI TV
4. Enable vsync in game
5. Run obs as administrator
6. Enable high performance mode in windows power options
7. On Win10 disable game mode, game bar and game DVR https://i.imgur.com/7CVH7c5.png
8. Make sure your gpu can do stable 60fps in game without being maxed. OBS needs some of gpu resources as well. If you did points 1+4 and its still maxed lower resolution and/or details.
9. Install Afterburner (or pure RTSS+HW Info) to monitor cpu/gpu load and start experimenting with tuning resolution / fps / x264 preset. GPU/CPU load should not exceed 85-90%

 

[oXijEx3]

I was wondering if it was possible to force OBS to use IGPU to do the Projector 1440P 144Hz to 1080P 60Hz scaling rather than the PCIEGPU... I believe this would easily solve the problem...

 

[oXijEx3]

I think the biggest issue that dual pc streamers face with obs is that by default it uses your primary gpu to do all of its compositing, scaling, filters, and color space conversions. If we could set OBS to utilise the IGPU to perform these functions then it might eliminate micro stuttering etc caused by the GPU prioritising OBS and the Game... It would leave the Primary GPU free to play the game and put a little bit extra load on CPU... and lets face it the CPU can take some more load in most games...