Why do some games have encoder overloads at 100% GPU usage and others don't?

[laputanmachine]

RX580 user here.

When I GC record Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts 1 there are no encoder overloads despite near constant 99 and 100% GPU usage. If the recordings have lag, it's not pronounced, and there weren't any encoder overloads in the log while capturing it.

When I GC record Aragami 1 it has encoder overloads and frequent moments of laggy video throughout the recording. GPU usage spikes to 99% and 100% on RTSS's OSD often and seemingly at random, which seems to coincide with the recording lag. I also separately tested limiting the game to 30 FPS and downgrading the settings, but GPU usage kept spiking to 99 and 100 anyway. There was no perceptible lag while playing.

Is it down to poor optimization? (even though both games seem to be poorly optimized?)

Is there a predictable pattern with which games will cause encoder overloads at 100% and which won't?
It would be nice to have a way of predicting whether a game will be a problem or not before recording and reviewing the recording.

I actually have a log of both Aragami 1 and SGWC 1 in the same session but it's over 1mb in size and I don't know how helpful that would be with this question

 

[koala]

If you use the AMD hardware encoder, a possible explanation may be the AMD hardware encoder uses GPU shader resources for encoding. This is in contrast to Nvidia's Nvenc, which is a dedicated circuit and doesn't use up any GPU resources. If the game also needs many shader resources, and it competes with the encoder for the resources, this might perhaps result in 100% GPU usage.

 

[laputanmachine]

If you use the AMD hardware encoder, a possible explanation may be the AMD hardware encoder uses GPU shader resources for encoding. This is in contrast to Nvidia's Nvenc, which is a dedicated circuit and doesn't use up any GPU resources. If the game also needs many shader resources, and it competes with the encoder for the resources, this might perhaps result in 100% GPU usage.

Yeah I'm using H264 AVC. I vaguely remember that when I had a Maxwell GPU it would keep encoding fine even at 100% usage, NVENC is pretty amazing.

Unfortunate that "CPU" encoders are not fast enough, otherwise one could just switch encoders when playing a game that starves the encoder.