Bug Report Unrealistically low frame rate for my hardware

[helvetica]

So I recently upgraded my system, and whenever I try to stream anything my frame rate stays at an unrealistically low rate for my hardware specs. It also drops my frame rate within the game regardless of quality settings and capture size. Any ideas or reasons that you guys can think of that would cause this? Attaching my most recent log log. Thank you

Quick hardware list
intel i7-5820K CPU
16gb dd4 ram
nvidia 980gtx

 

[Krazy]

Er, it looks like your GPU is either completely overworked or something is going wrong. Which games have you tried? Have you tried enabling VSync or otherwise capping FPS? Perhaps a clean reinstall of the drivers would help?

 

[helvetica]

I've tried it with wow, and with league. both run at about 12 fps. Once obs is off, league runs at around 250fps and wow runs at about 150fps. I'll take a run at re-installing drivers. thanks for the reply

 

[Rodney]

Is the issue also present when your webcam is disabled (i.e. not in the current scene and not a global source)?

 

[helvetica]

yes, it still occurs without the webcam enabled.

 

[Lain]

It's either happening because of window capture, or because of your webcam. This feels very unusual because that's ultra top end hardware, and even my terrible hardware that's far weaker generally has no issue with any of those things, at high resolution even.

I feel like I doubt the webcam is at fault. I have the same webcam and have never experienced any issues with it.

Sometimes, window capture can have strange issues such as this, especially on windows 7 (mostly caused by code in windows itself more than anything), I'd have to see the computer first hand to be able to make a guess as to what's really going on, but in the mean time, if window capture is the fault, then try a different capture method, such as game capture, which should be great on that hardware.

 

[helvetica]

@Jim hmm, just tried running it with game capture and with the webcam disabled, problem still persists. is it possibly a windows issue? Attached log.

 

[Lain]

Hm, I believe I am seeing the problem now. The problem wasn't with window capture, the problem appears to be.. Okay, first of all is that SLI? Also, hm, two monitors plugged in.

Okay, I have a theory of what's going wrong. I'm guessing that with your super-ultra-highend setup you most likely got SLI. And I'm going to somewhat guess that you may have plugged in one monitor in to one card and then another monitor in to the other (although that may not be significant, it may still happen if they're both plugged in the same one, and might be caused partly by SLI).

I don't know if SLI is in use here, SLI may be unrelated to the issue, but regardless, it appears it might be related to the two monitors. This happens under very rare circumstances and I've seen it happen before. I don't know exactly what conditions trigger it but I can only guess.

First, you may want to ensure that the two monitors are plugged in to the same adapter, not different adapters. May be part of the problem.

Second, try turning off the preview in OBS (right click the preview pane to get the menu where you can disable it). In this circumstance the preview may be causing a major stall due to the two monitors and causing data to be transferred in a super slow way by the driver somehow so it can draw on the other monitor (though if you followed the first step this usually shouldn't be an issue, but SLI may play a role in still causing problems with this, and this alone may fix it)

Note, that it's possible SLI might be involved as well. SLI and the capture methods OBS uses actually do not go together too well -- this recommendation is not something I like to have to tell people because of how expensive SLI is, but it's a common issue. I usually recommend temporarily disabling SLI while capturing if you're able. If you're running a super GPU intensive game that doesn't really play well without SLI, you may try to see what capture methods work best with SLI to try to ensure that you can capture it. Though you have enough CPU to spare that there are potential workarounds to allow capturing with SLI. Otherwise, I feel like you might want to disable it while streaming/recording. SLI is meant for playing games as fast as possible, not so much for capturing, capturing can have issues with it.

However if you get it resolved with the prior suggestions and things are working fine with SLI, then you can probably ignore that last bit about it.