Question / Help Trying to improve quality, what can I change to achieve stable 21:9 720p 30 fps?

[Chewy77]

First off here's the log file: Log File 29/07/2018 11:31 pm

I was streaming ghost recon wildlands and I was trying out 21:9 720p from 2560x1080, I normaly stream 540p. And I noticed on the laptop i use to monitor my stream that there was severe lag in certain instances. I don't use the laptop to stream, just to monitor. My hardware and internet should be able to handle 720p 30fps. Here's a Speed test ookla & the log files show hardware, I've done the twitch inspector thing and the connection is pretty stable, but i don't think that's that useful.

So when I noticed the lag, here, I decided to drop the resolution, but that was still pretty laggy so I dropped it to 540p. That last time I saw lag, I thought maybe it was bitrate, maybe aussie internet is just that bad and I'd have to go for 3500, I rememebr trying 4000 on Friday and that didn't pan out well. I was hoping 3600 would work, so the video quality might improve slightly.

Am I doing something wrong?
Are my settings wrong?
would streaming at 16:9 help in the fps department?

All help will be appreciated

 

[Deleted member 121471]

Based on your logfile, you have 3 problems:

1) GPU is being slightly overloaded;
2) CPU encoder is overwhelmed;
3) Your internet connection doesn't seem able to handle 3600kbps in one of your sessions

I recommend the following options, at 720p@30FPS@3500kbps or 720p@60FPS@3500kbps, depending on whether you prefer image quality or smoothness:

1) Use NVENC encoding at high quality setting (best option);
2) x264 and CPU preset at "very fast" (alternative).

16:9 would help lower the necessary resources needed to encode but, more importantly, it would remove the black bars on most people's screens which are usually 16:9 aspect ratio.

If not using it already, use ingame options to turn on VSYNC or cap your frame rate or use Rivatuner to do the latter for all applications.

Finally, if you want to check for stream or recording issues in real time, you can open View-->Stats, in the main OBS window.

 

[Chewy77]

wow that was quick, thank you very much

I forgot I set CPU preset to fast, I thought that might have been better for stability.

I've read around that x264 is preferrable over nvenc, so i'll stick with it

I've already capped all my games to 60fps, so that's not an issue

To get that 16:9 ratio going. I apply a scaling/ratio filter from "Filters" for game capture correct?
And should I check the "undistort center of image when scaling from ultrawide"?

Thank you again for all the info

 

[Deleted member 121471]

The hardware encoder on the 10x0 series of NVIDIA GPUs, when configured correctly, has similar image quality to x264 "very fast" preset, which is why it's usually recommended.

Slower x264 CPU presets do improve image quality but require a lot more resources and have diminishing returns.

If you want to stream at 16:9 aspect ratio, as far as I'm aware, there's no way to stream ultrawide without black bars on the top and bottom of the stream, squeezing the image horizontally or truncating the left and right sides of it. Blackbars is really the best case scenario.

 

[Chewy77]

I'll see what happens with the cpu preset changes and proceed from there. I'm hoping that was the problem.
It's a shame I can't get rid of the blackbars, oh well stable fps is the priority for now.

Thank you again for all the info