Doom and OBS recording - best settings to prevent frame dropping

[Ed Fire]

Hey ladies and gents,

Firstly, what a STOMPING game. Picked it up a couple of weeks ago, and haven't put it down. Great job.

OK, so I've asked on the OBS forum, but, as there's no solution there yet, wanted to ask the Steam community. I find most problems are fixed between us.

I'm suffering with dropped frames in local recording, leading to a less than smooth 60FPS video. Same happens with Outlast 2, out of interest. No dip in performance of game play for me: frame rate stays at 60FPS without difficulty. Only the recording suffers.

System is:
16GB ram
I7-6700 processor
GTX-1070

I've turned off HDR, turned down graphical settings, and generally done what I can to reduce pressure on OBS, but it hasn't solved the problem. I've also following what feels like EVERY YouTube video on how to prevent frame drops in local records, and whilst some has helped a bit, it's still an issue.

I assume there are some YouTubers here who user OBS to capture this game. Do you have any tips/tricks or a good "how to" to work from?

Thanks in advance, everyone!

[Salamand3r-]

Make sure you are using the nvenc encoder, should fix the problem.

If not, honestly just use Shadowplay. It lacks some of the feature set of OBS, and the quality can be slightly lower (depending on what settings you are using in OBS), but it doesn't have the same issues.

OBS does not, and never has, played very well with OpenGL games. It's best to use a different solution much of the time.

[Ed Fire]

Amazing! Thank you. I'll give it a try and will come back to confirm.

I was previously using Shadowplay about a month ago, but the bloody thing started malfunctioning on me: I'd be recording for 30 minutes, but the video would have shifted by 40 seconds or so, making it either 29:20 or 30:40 (as examples). That rendered them useless, as my talking/screaming was completely out of time with what was happening on screen.

Ps. Amnesia and UT2004 both record perfectly. That may be relevant. Anyway, I'll report back.

[rawWwRrr]

Originally posted by Salamand3r:

OBS does not, and never has, played very well with OpenGL games. It's best to use a different solution much of the time.

Indeed. Typical setup is an Elgato capture card in another box that runs OBS.

[Ed Fire]

Hey gang,

I've done what you said (setting the local capture codec to nvenc (libx264), and the dropped frames has gone down to 0.2%. Great job!

Weirdly enough, neither disk in my laptop, nor the ram, nor the processor are being overloaded. I assume this is a graphics card issue, in which case?

[Ed Fire]

Thanks, Node. Weirdly, my CPU never goes above 50% usage in game, and that's despite the codec that I use. I've set it back to the default settings, and will keep plugging away to find the best option.

I just love the fact that OBS records in a fixed rather than variable FPS. It cuts my work flow down substantially.

[Salamand3r-]

Originally posted by Ed Fire:

Thanks, Node. Weirdly, my CPU never goes above 50% usage in game, and that's despite the codec that I use. I've set it back to the default settings, and will keep plugging away to find the best option.

I just love the fact that OBS records in a fixed rather than variable FPS. It cuts my work flow down substantially.

Your CPU as a whole may be going on 50%, but I bet if your were to check per-core utilization you would see one or two cores at 100%.

You are being limited by the CPU. You will either have to drop quality settings down to the bare minimums, use nvenc or other GPU encoding, or spring for a dedicated capture device.

[Rich]

I could never get OBS to work, never had any sound in DOOM.

[Ed Fire]

Originally posted by Salamand3r:

Your CPU as a whole may be going on 50%, but I bet if your were to check per-core utilization you would see one or two cores at 100%.

You are being limited by the CPU. You will either have to drop quality settings down to the bare minimums, use nvenc or other GPU encoding, or spring for a dedicated capture device.

Thanks for all your help :)

[Ed Fire]

It's the strangest thing, but I've been playing with the settings of OBS Studio, and, although it's improved dramatically, it's still note 100%. I thought I'd post my updates for the sake of others who find this post.

The biggest things I've done since switching to nvenc are:

Reduce game resolution
Turn off DSR
Overclock CPU and GPU
Monitor GPU with GPU-Z
Increase CQP (compression of video) dramatically
Change FPS capture from 60 to 48
Record to an external HDD via USB 3.0

And none appear to have fixed the final 2% of frame drops.

I'd hesitate to guess the CPU is bottle-necking, but overclocking makes no difference.

(Puzzled face)

[Catmality]

Originally posted by Ed Fire:

It's the strangest thing, but I've been playing with the settings of OBS Studio, and, although it's improved dramatically, it's still note 100%. I thought I'd post my updates for the sake of others who find this post.

The biggest things I've done since switching to nvenc are:

Reduce game resolution
Turn off DSR
Overclock CPU and GPU
Monitor GPU with GPU-Z
Increase CQP (compression of video) dramatically
Change FPS capture from 60 to 48
Record to an external HDD via USB 3.0

And none appear to have fixed the final 2% of frame drops.

I'd hesitate to guess the CPU is bottle-necking, but overclocking makes no difference.

(Puzzled face)

OBS isn't friendly with OpenGL games, so it's probably unfixable.

[Ed Fire]

Originally posted by Catmality:

OBS isn't friendly with OpenGL games, so it's probably unfixable.

(Noob alert with my next comment, so.please bear with me)

It does the same with Outlast 2, which appears to use Direct3D 11. Is that similar to OpenGL, or could something else be afoot?

[Ed Fire]

Failing a solution, is there anything than works better? Not Shadowplay, as it's broken for me.

[Salamand3r-]

Originally posted by Ed Fire:

Failing a solution, is there anything than works better? Not Shadowplay, as it's broken for me.

What is broken about it?

If you are looking for free solutions, OBS or Shadowplay are your best options (or ReLive on AMD cards).

Probably easier to fix Shadowplay than purchase Xsplit or Action.

[Ed Fire]

Originally posted by Salamand3r:

Originally posted by Ed Fire:

Failing a solution, is there anything than works better? Not Shadowplay, as it's broken for me.

What is broken about it?

If you are looking for free solutions, OBS or Shadowplay are your best options (or ReLive on AMD cards).

Probably easier to fix Shadowplay than purchase Xsplit or Action.

I'll give it another try, as they've released a new update in the last week or so.

It's a really frustrating and strange error: if I was recording for 30 minutes, the video length would be 29:34 and the cam and audio I'd recorded separately would be totally out of sync with the video (even after using Handbrake to get a constant FPS). Pain in the bum, and a lot of time wasted.

As an aside, I guess there's no way to force Shadowplay to record at fixed FPS? Having to use Handbrake drastically increases my workflow :o/

[RocketMan]

Originally posted by Ed Fire:

Hey ladies and gents,

Firstly, what a STOMPING game. Picked it up a couple of weeks ago, and haven't put it down. Great job.

OK, so I've asked on the OBS forum, but, as there's no solution there yet, wanted to ask the Steam community. I find most problems are fixed between us.

I'm suffering with dropped frames in local recording, leading to a less than smooth 60FPS video. Same happens with Outlast 2, out of interest. No dip in performance of game play for me: frame rate stays at 60FPS without difficulty. Only the recording suffers.

System is:
16GB ram
I7-6700 processor
GTX-1070

I've turned off HDR, turned down graphical settings, and generally done what I can to reduce pressure on OBS, but it hasn't solved the problem. I've also following what feels like EVERY YouTube video on how to prevent frame drops in local records, and whilst some has helped a bit, it's still an issue.

I assume there are some YouTubers here who user OBS to capture this game. Do you have any tips/tricks or a good "how to" to work from?

Thanks in advance, everyone!

Another option is to hook up an hdmi splitter to a video recorder. That way you have zero performance loss while playing. And as its just copying your hdmi video/audio output you arent losing any quality.

There is lots of ways of going about this. I can post a link to an all-in-one when I get home.

Doing stuff on the hardware side of things will typically give you easier and simpler results.