Question / Help [SOLVED] Encoding Overloaded while CPU usage is low on high end machine

[NGen15]

Good day to you all,

I'm having a bit of a weird issue with OBS after I reinstalled my machine. Unfortunately on November 14th during a stream, one of my custom loop pipes came off and spilled all the liquid on the system. Luckily the only thing that died was my NVMe SSD and I had that replaced. That meant I had to reinstall everything all over again.

After setting everything up I went to stream yesterday and something seems quite odd. Even with a blank canvas (as shown in the attached log) I get encoding overloaded as soon as I try to do something. CPU usage is no higher than 30% and the settings are the same as they were prior to the accident. Drivers all updated. Also tried with OBS Studio 20.1.1 which is what I had then as well as rolling back to any drivers I had.

It goes even beyond the medium preset since it also happens on ultrafast. Temperatures are fine, there's no thermal throttling happening. The FPS counter on OBS also dips to 54 sometimes and I'm not even playing anything. The only thing I launch the test is the League of Legends launcher which isn't even an issue on my other machine with an i5-2500k.

EDIT: Testing using local recording to eliminate any connection issues (which I didn't have anyway).

Any ideas of what might be going on?

 

[BK-Morpheus]

Can you create another log with very fast preset?
You said the CPU usage was not higher than 30%. Is this true for every thread, or just the overall CPU usage, or the usage that OBS shows in the status bar?

I suggest to open the taskmanager and check which process is causing load and how much.
6.25% overall CPU load could mean one thread/core at 100% load, while the other 15threads idle at 0%.
~30% CPU load could be 5 threads at high load and 11threads on idle.

CPUID HWMonitor can show you CPU utilization for every thread, frequencies of every core and temperatures.

Dips in the OBS fps counter could also mean GPU overload, which usually happens, if you have a game running without fps limit / vsync. GPU load should always stay below 90%, so that there are enough rendering resources left for OBS to render the scene (even if it's just black).

 

[NGen15]

I will get a log.

In the meantime to reply to the rest, all 16 threads have similar low activity. 30% is overall. No game is being launched, I'm just launching the League of Legends launcher.

No thread goes above 50% load, GPU core load is 32.2% at maximum. All threads running at 3.8GHz, voltages holding as expected. temps never exceeding 50C. There's an 800W dissipation quad radiator custom loop on the CPU alone. RAM timing is as advertised 16-18-18-38 and speed is 2933MHz just slightly lower than the 3000 on the box.

Everything monitored through HWinfo.

 

[BK-Morpheus]

@Gordon:
Number of lagged frames due to rendering lag/stalls: 3257 (7.5%)
GPU overload.
Any refreshrate mixes like 144Hz + 60Hz on your setup?

 

[BK-Morpheus]

Then I'm out of ideas. I don't have this problem with my Ryzen system.
OP got not sources in his scene and OBS drops under 60fps, while GPU and every CPU thread stays on low load.
Maybe download Latencymonitor tool to see if there are crazy latency spikes and which driver is causing it.

 

[BK-Morpheus]

Your new log has 25 memory leaks (which are usually browser source related), but only two browser sources.
You could try if removing both browser sources will improve the situation.

16:50:12.459: Output 'adv_stream': Number of lagged frames due to rendering lag/stalls: 782 (2.5%)
16:50:12.459: Output 'adv_stream': Number of dropped frames due to insufficient bandwidth/connection stalls: 46 (0.2%)
16:50:12.459: Video stopped, number of skipped frames due to encoding lag: 1/30655 (0.0%)

Only 1 frame skipped frame due to encoding lag (cpu load) is okay. Some connection problems between your router and the twitch server as well (0.2%)...maybe some IPS problems with packet loss, but not concerning.
2.5% lagged/stalled frames due to GPU overload. If you already play with a 60fps limit, you could reduce ingame details a little bit. If you play without fps limit, there is nothing you can do, other than limiting the fps.
Overall 2.5% lagged frames is till not bad, so the stream/video should be pretty good.

 

[NGen15]

@BK-Morpheus I'm checking LatencyMon right now and it seems the Nvidia drivers are causing latency. Will proceed with clean installing the drivers and see how that goes.

 

[BK-Morpheus]

In general some spike on the nvidia driver or directx kernel are normal, when you are gaming, while monitoring the dpc latency.
Most of the time they should still be in the "green" area, where Latency Monitor still says, that your computer is fine for video/audio realtime stuff.

 

[NGen15]

It's all in the green during idling.

 

[NGen15]

Thanks everyone for the help. I bit the bullet and went for a fresh Windows 10 reinstallation. CPU seems much happier now and I managed to record at 1080p60 6000kbps on fast preset to test without issues.