Question / Help Unusual frame drops

[Icescythe]

Alright so I've fiddled around with streaming programs for almost two years and I still don't know very much about anything when it comes to the most optimal settings.

Anyway my settings are always great for streaming pretty much anything. That being said one thing it isnt great for is streaming and speedrunning one game in particular. The game is Psychonauts, which is fairly old and should run fine, but it does run on only 1 core and the glitch I perform is pretty frame intensive. It works through 90% of the game, theres only two spots I cannot perform the flying glitch .. which I pretty much need to since you can skip a lot of the game with it saving a lot of time.

One of the two spots that this occurs the frames [I opened fraps to get a frame counter going] it will be around 60-70 fps , I'll use levitation , it will drop almost 20 frames... I'll try the glitch and I'll be around 30-40 fps.. The glitch doesnt work unless you are around 60ish fps.

I will be upgrading my pc soon, but even with an upgrade how much of a difference will I see? I can perform this glitch with OBS not streaming which makes me feel like maybe my settings are awful for this?

 

[Krazy]

It's probably just your system being under too much load while streaming. That's a pretty old/weak CPU by this point, so a system upgrade will definitely help you out. What are you planning to upgrade to?

 

[Icescythe]

Alright so the question is, are there any settings I can use to bring load on the cpu down? the processor I have may be old, but aside from that the game I am playing is old and takes almost nothing to run. It's only downside is that it uses only one of my cores Which is why I feel an upgrade may not effect anything other than a slight FPS increase.

as for the upgrades I was looking into a FX-4350 and a gtx 660 .

 

[Krazy]

Newer processors have better architecture and do things more efficiently, it's not just a clock speed increase, so you will probably still see a noticeably difference in performance. I can't really recommend the FX-4000 series, though. They just really aren't great CPUs. Honestly, anything under an FX-8000 series isn't really going to be worth the time, imo.

As for what you can do now, you can trying changing the encoding preset in Advanced settings to Superfast, should reduce streaming load by a noticeable amount. You can probably even lower your bitrate a little bit, 2500 is overkill for 480p30fps even at Veryfast.

 

[Icescythe]

Hmm... But the difference wouldn't be that huge with either in my opinion. Most games [especially old ones] don't even use 4 cores. Does OBS utilize the 8 from the 8000? because the 4350 I looked at had a better single core performance over a 8150

 

[Krazy]

Again...it's not about how many cores are being used when it comes to single threaded games, it's about how well each core performs on its own. Later CPUs (especially Intel ones) have better single thread performance than older generations.

OBS uses x264 encoding, which will use up as many threads as you have available to use. This is why CPUs like the FX-8000 series and the intel i7's are so good for streaming, they have 8 threads to play with. You can also assign processes to specific cores, and with 8 threads you've got more room to play with. Assign that game to it's own thread, assign OBS to everything else BUT that thread.

 

[Icescythe]

Thank you for the help :) ! Now I do know how to set affinity.. but what about a game that doesnt let you assign a core to it? [this game is poorly ported :P] Can I assign OBS to not use this core? [Doesn't seem to let me]

 

[FerretBomb]

You set core affinity from the task manager, not in the game. Hit CTRL+SHIFT+ESC, go to the Processes tab, find your game's process and right click on it. Select 'Set Affinity...' and uncheck all but one core (for a single-thread game). Then do the same for the OBS process and uncheck the one you left checked for the game. Boom, running on separate 'cores'. If you're really worried about it and your CPU uses hyperthreading, you can uncheck both CPU threads that run on the same core to keep them fully separate (in my case this is usually 0+1).
You'll need to do this each time you start OBS and the game up, as it'll default back to using all-cores.

The core/thread that the game runs on is set by the OS, not by the game (except in the case of flash-based games, which will almost always need to run on CPU 0).

 

[Krazy]

Yeah, you can just tell OBS to run on every core but the one that game is using.

 

[Icescythe]

*Edit!: After some thorough googling I have found out why OBS wasn't letting me set affinity.. which is strange since I am the administrator and have been running it as administrator.. all I had to do was click show all processes from all users. Anyway thanks for the help

 

[FerretBomb]

Need to open task manager as Administrator too, if you're running on a usermode account. Is there a particular reason you're running OBS as admin?

 

[Icescythe]

This account is the admin . No user accounts are even on this. The reason why obs is being run as administrator is because it will not capture in game mode for psychonauts ( again it's an old game that runs in Windows 95 compatability) which might be why it needs admin either way problem solved