Question / Help Stream Stutters and Lags Terribly; Works Fine in Shadowcast

Lanky_Nibz

Lanky_Nibz

New Member
If you want to jump right to the nitty gritty, here's the log.

Hey everyone, I have a weird issue that I was hoping you all could help me out with. I am trying to do some streaming with OBS, but everytime I try to stream anything fairly graphically intense (in this case Borderlands 2), my Twitch.TV stream is laggy to the point of being unwatchable (we are talking slideshow). In a moment of frustration, I decided to use the NVidia Shadowcast . . . and lo and behold I could stream perfectly smooth at 720p (with the NVidia presets being 720 @ 3500 bitrate)!

Here's my rig:
  • Phenom II X4 960
  • Geforce GTX 960
  • 12 gigs RAM
  • Wired ethernet (28.6 Mbps d/l, 5.96 Mbps up)
And I was running my OBS stream:
  • In administrator mode
  • On my local server (East Coast NYC)
  • 1280 x 720 output
  • 30 FPS
  • 2000 bitrate (CBR)
  • Fast CPU speed
Now at this point I fudged with every item above (bitrate, CPU speed, & FPS) AND I even turned off the NVidia Shadowcast suite entirely, but the result was always the same: unwatchable lagginess. The one thing that almost worked was when I bumped the CPU preference up to very high. Then my actual game framerate plunged, but the stream seemed to match the general choppiness of my FPS (rather than being a slideshow).

I don't mind using Shadowcast, but I'd rather support OBS as a product cause it's more indie and I'm intrigued with the built in toolkit. Can anyone help me out with ideas?
 
X

xKlokwerkz

Member
Change your CPU Preset from Fast to Very Fast and test that. In terms of x264 CPU presets, the slower you encode each frame, the better the quality. You going from the default Very Fast to Fast actually added more load to your already underpowered CPU.

Also add a log.
 
Lanky_Nibz

Lanky_Nibz

New Member
Hmm I've tried every setting of CPU from normal, all the way up to ultra, with just varying degrees of "slideshow" lag. The log should be linked at the top of my post there, too.
 
F

fatmatrow

Member
Shadowplay uses gpu hardware encoding, which lessens the impact on cpu, but requires a higher bitrate than x264 for quality parity. Your processor doesn't have enough oomph to play and stream using x264 at the faster preset
 
Lanky_Nibz

Lanky_Nibz

New Member
So is my only option to upgrade the processor? Or is there any setting I can use in OBS to get the stream working?
 
Lanky_Nibz

Lanky_Nibz

New Member
Cheers, thanks! Now for a stupid question on my part: how do I downscale to 720? I've been through all the menus and I can't seem to find it. I feel like I'm missing something. I have the rescale output set to 1280 x 720, but that's not the same thing, is it?
 
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