Skipped frames due to encoding lag

[jbitakis]

While livestreaming our church service, I noticed the message, "Skipped frames due to encoding lag" 4.7%.
CPU 60.2% usage. 30fps. No dropped frames. Bitrate 4717.
Should I change the encoder from x264 to the hardware encoder?
Can I buy a better graphics card and would that help?

 

[FerretBomb]

Best would be to provide a logfile from a session where the issue occurred.
We'd be able to provide pertinent advice then, rather than generalized guessing. :)
There's a topic pinned at the top of this support forum with instructions on how to do so.

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

There are lots of factors involved. In general, a Turing or Ampere based nVidia GPU (GTX 1650 Super are higher) will help reduce CPU load by offloading video encoding using NVENC. The video quality should be fine (is for our House of Worship stream).
BUT... there could be other bottlenecks on your system. real-time video encoding is computationally demanding.
Using a low-power or old PC may have other, non GPU hindrances. So a GPU upgrade should help, but maybe not enough to justify cost??.. sorry it depends

So as noted above, post an OBS log from a streaming session so folks here can check you settings and see if anything obviously problematic. If the PC is older/under-powered, then optimizing the Operating System (turning off eye-candy, unused services, stopping unused background processes, etc) might help. If you don't know how to do such an OS optimization, get someone who truly knows what they are doing... a lot of Internet 'advice'/recommendations are made by the ignorant, and will only hurt your system, not help