Question / Help Stuttering when recording from Avermedia Live Gamer Portable 2

[Haiku_Oezu]

Hey everyone,
I'm writing in the hopes that somebody can help me out here. I have an Avermedia Live Gamer Portable 2 capture card that I'm trying to use to record Nintendo Switch footage.
The card is correctly detected in OBS and I'm able to get both video and audio just fine. However as I played back some of my 1080p60 recordings I noticed there's some very visible "hitching" or "stuttering", like the video is clearly 60fps but it appears to be dropping frames here and there.

Thinking maybe the card just wasn't up to par I installed Windows on my iMac 5K (specs in the log file) and used both Avermedia's RECentral and OBS to record some footage, which doesn't actually have any stuttering whatsoever, footage is as smooth as it appears from the console itself.

I'm honestly confused, especially because the little stat window doesn't show any dropped frames (well technically it shows a few at the very beginning but the video consistently stutters throughout)
I have tried both x264 and Apple's Hardware encoder but none give me smooth video, with x264 being the worst offender.

Is there something I should try investigating to find the cause? Here's my log file
https://obsproject.com/logs/eekOcO4enPI-EOW_

And these are my video source settings
https://d.pr/i/bF9s78
https://d.pr/i/XGKhkd

Here's a video sample (128MB), make sure to click download as I'm pretty sure Droplr re-encodes the preview
https://d.pr/v/DkrAwl
Pay attention at the way the camera zooms in when Pikachu gets closer to Ryu, the motion is visibly choppy but in game it zooms in smoothly

 

[Narcogen]

Apps like RECentral work differently than OBS; they don't do compositing and so use fewer resources, especially on the GPU side.

On the same hardware, OBS will generally perform better on Windows than on MacOS because of the nature of certain elements of the OS-- there are also features on MacOS that are missing.

The hardware encoder options on Windows, for instance, are much better than on MacOS-- the only one available on MacOS is equivalent to the worst one available on Windows (QuickSync).

1080p60 is challenging. If you don't need compositing or streaming because you're just trying to record directly from a console, then you don't need OBS-- you can use ShadowPlay, RECentral, etc.

If you have Windows installed on the same hardware and don't need to use MacOS for recording, then don't-- you will get better performance from the same hardware on Windows.

 

[Haiku_Oezu]

Apps like RECentral work differently than OBS; they don't do compositing and so use fewer resources, especially on the GPU side.

On the same hardware, OBS will generally perform better on Windows than on MacOS because of the nature of certain elements of the OS-- there are also features on MacOS that are missing.

The hardware encoder options on Windows, for instance, are much better than on MacOS-- the only one available on MacOS is equivalent to the worst one available on Windows (QuickSync).

1080p60 is challenging. If you don't need compositing or streaming because you're just trying to record directly from a console, then you don't need OBS-- you can use ShadowPlay, RECentral, etc.

If you have Windows installed on the same hardware and don't need to use MacOS for recording, then don't-- you will get better performance from the same hardware on Windows.

I figured that might be the case but why am I not getting any dropped frames in my stats window or the log file? I'm a little confused as to why there's no evidence of the stuttering.

After I posted this I've done some experiments and I noticed that enabling buffering in the video source pretty much fixes the issue (save for the occasional frame drop if I'm doing GPU/CPU intensive tasks while the recording is going)

EDIT: Oh yeah forgot to mention, this also happens when recording at 720p60; no dropped frames are reported but the video is visibly choppy.