Question / Help Unstable Frame Rate (No "dropped frames" showing in UI)

[CSGOcreeP]

I reinstalled OBS Studio onto my SSD about a week ago during some PC troubleshooting and now this is happening the first time I try to stream. I checked the forums here before posting, not sure anything there applies to me.

Typically I stream CSGO at 60fps as my main game, running in bicubic 1080p native downscaled to 720p with absolutely zero issues. I turn down to 30fps for games like PUBG, Overwatch, and most of the variety stuff I play.

I went to stream Overwatch at 30fps on Tuesday when the event dropped and my frame rate would not stay at 30fps constant, but what struck me as strange was the 'dropped frames' readout reading zero. Is this a common error with a known solution?

Log file here: https://gist.github.com/8afecb76ed55212c071d26e6bef9f0f0

My FPS in game doesn't change at all, FYI, and my GPU load for these games is using less than 1GB of the memory in everything except PUBG. The framerate simply just bounces between 15 and 30 at random intervals.

PC Specs:
Ryzen 5 1600 clocked at 3.2ghz (6 cores)
EVGA GTX 1050Ti 4GB FTW OC
8GB Corsair Vengeance LPX 3200mHz (downclocked to 2133mHz)
WD Blue 240gb m.2 6gb/s SATA
600W 80+ EVGA PSU
5400RPM Seagate 200GB HDD (running some of the games)

OBS Settings:
30/60fps @ 3500/4500 kbp/s respectively
Bicubic (also tried bilinear to no avail)
Default encoding settings/audio settings
720p output scaling (option on the FPS select settings menu)

I did grab the latest NVIDIA driver this week as well, but other than that my PC hasn't changed at all. Any advice would be appreciated, even just brainstorming!

 

[Fenrir]

Cap FPS in your game if you are not already at something your PC can hold stable without being overloaded.

 

[CSGOcreeP]

Is it as simple as that? Can you explain for future reference why it behaves that way and what's actually happening to cause that? I just want to understand why.

 

[Fenrir]

Running a game without vertical sync or a frame rate limiter will frequently cause performance issues with OBS because your GPU will be maxed out. Enable vsync or set a reasonable frame rate limit that your GPU can handle without hitting 100% usage. If that's not enough you may also need to turn down some of the video quality options in the game.

 

[CSGOcreeP]

I'm willing to try this out, but it doesn't make sense to me. My GPU uses less than 1/4 of the available VRAM to run OW at 120fps on "high". It's not near it's full load, but I'll try limiting the frames to a constant 60. I think what you're missing here is that until I reinstalled OBS onto my SSD I didn't have this issue playing OW with no frame cap etc like you're suggesting.