Question / Help What component does a GPU card require to send the game video to OBS/Shadowplay.

[I3ordo]

During 70-80% usage on Cpu and GPU, the video data arrives (to OBS) as skipped frames and encoded as is... yet the gaming monitor shows none of this UNLESS you turn off "frame smoothing" or reduce "pre-rendered frames limit".

I end up with a choppy poor recorded video file while having great time with it! (the game) and that s a big problem!

I am planning to workaround it by forgetting about "Live streaming" and record the HDMI out via dedicated capture box then comp it in post.

OR!
Would getting a "Cam link" device and adding the "HDMI in" for capturing video (thus not use any game capture/display capture) would i benefit?

How much impact using a 1080p60fps "video capture device" source does bring? I cant tell as i dont have the hardware yet.

 

[Narcogen]

Probably not.

Even if you tell OBS to capture your video from a capture device instead of directly from the GPU, it still needs to render that frame to allow for composition. The real advantage to switching to a capture card is to allow compositing and rendering to be done on a 2nd machine, splitting the load of streaming or recording and playing the game between two different machines.

The only way to eliminate the additional GPU load caused by using a program like OBS when streaming or recording is to use software that doesn't do any of its own rendering because it doesn't allow for arbitrary composing of frames-- for instance, Shadowplay.

 

[I3ordo]

Well, shadow play on my rigs drops frames too, as i play for hours, i watch the recording of a bare bones scene collection that can not be watched for one minute because of the skips...

Maybe when the 1080p image that is sent to Base Canvas gets too detailed like loads of patterns and with drastic overlall scene change, the area of the GPU that is responsbile to draw that image (texel engine maybe ? i am so uneducated about this yet)dont have enough time to send it to OBS's canvas...

I dont get that stutter on cartoonish games. It usually happens when the motion on screen is too long. even though the GPu and CPU usages are 60%ish

According to my "pipe" theory, GPU's a specific module (?) dont have enough time to draw to screen then send to scene all by himself.

so by getting a capture card, i maybe actually off loading that task "sending video image to "OBS's canvas", off the GPU but to the CPU,
as i believe the CPU is reponsible to receive the data from device sources...

I am aware that GPU will yet again draw the image inside OBS, but currently i feel that OBS does not receive any imagge at all... It would report them as "render lag" if it did.

 

[I3ordo]

There is a "copy engine" and it is very easy to max it out while having minimal GPu usage. My guess is My card's "Copy engine" which might be a software engine rather than a hardware one like the "NVENC encoder".


So checking the GPUz's "GPU load" was misleading me to believe that my GPu was NOT maxing out.