Question / Help Cant hold consistent 60fps while streaming MW

[TGODneilan]

So tonight with the release of Modern Warfare i had streamed for a few hours. And the game ran fine, stream ran fine as far as no dropped frames and very minimal render lag. But watching the VoD back its very obvious the stream was lagging down to 30-45fps and not holding 60fps stable. I Stream using x264 on Fast preset with an i9 9900k and rtx 2080. single pc setup.

The log file should be from my latest stream. around a 2.5 hour stream. game played fine and smooth at around 100-120(cap using RTSS) fps the whole time.

Most places i've looked suggest the usual turn off Game dvr, game mode and the likes. Which I have all turned off. CPU usage never seems to be a problem just want to see if there is anything with my settings that maybe could be causing the FPS lag. The only other thing I can think of that I haven't tested yet is I do have preview in OBS enabled while streaming. Will try tomorrow to turn it off and see what results i get.

Thanks for any help or tips u guys might have.

 

[FiftyTifty]

While you're recording, alt-tab from the game, and look at OBS' recording preview. Does that suddenly cause your framerate to return to how it should be? Also, when you've alt-tabbed out, does your GPU usage in MW stay the same, but OBS' GPU usage return to 1% or so?

 

[BK-Morpheus]

Log looks ok to me. Could be a multi monitor problem (disabling OBS preview and browsers on additional monitors could help with this).
It could also simply be a mismatch of ingame vs. recording framerate. You said that that you are using an RTSS frame limit, but you get between 100 and 120fps (so some kind of bottleneck is happening that prevents your game from running exactly at the set fps limit). At least in those situations, where your ingame fps drop down to anything under 120fps, the stream will look a little bit choppy.
This is reproducible...no matter if I run my game with 57fps or with 65fps...the 60fps recording is not smooth, as long as the ingame frame rate is not consistent and compatible (1:1, 2:1 or 1:2) with the recording frame rate.

It also could just be a problem of the VOD playback. I gett some stutter while using Firefox for VOD playback, while Chrome plays exactly the same VOD perfectly smooth. Last but not least, make sure, your refreshrate is compatible, while watching the VOD...a 60fps video won't look smooth on 70Hz or 144Hz (although the higher the refreshrate, the less obvious the mismatched refreshrate gets). As long as Webbrowser video playback is not working with Gsync/Freesync, I'd suggest to use 60 or 120Hz for browsing youtube/twitch, to run a compatible refreshrate.

 

[TGODneilan]

Log looks ok to me. Could be a multi monitor problem (disabling OBS preview and browsers on additional monitors could help with this).
It could also simply be a mismatch of ingame vs. recording framerate. You said that that you are using an RTSS frame limit, but you get between 100 and 120fps (so some kind of bottleneck is happening that prevents your game from running exactly at the set fps limit). At least in those situations, where your ingame fps drop down to anything under 120fps, the stream will look a little bit choppy.
This is reproducible...no matter if I run my game with 57fps or with 65fps...the 60fps recording is not smooth, as long as the ingame frame rate is not consistent and compatible (1:1, 2:1 or 1:2) with the recording frame rate.

It also could just be a problem of the VOD playback. I gett some stutter while using Firefox for VOD playback, while Chrome plays exactly the same VOD perfectly smooth. Last but not least, make sure, your refreshrate is compatible, while watching the VOD...a 60fps video won't look smooth on 70Hz or 144Hz (although the higher the refreshrate, the less obvious the mismatched refreshrate gets). As long as Webbrowser video playback is not working with Gsync/Freesync, I'd suggest to use 60 or 120Hz for browsing youtube/twitch, to run a compatible refreshrate.

this is a lot of really good info and I thank you for that! The bottleneck is my GPU for sure as at 1440p high settings there are a few situations where it hits max usage and struggles to hold the 120fps. but i never assumed it would have that much of an effect on stream if it didnt hold fairly consistent. Would u recommend regardless that i turn some settings down to ensure i can hold 120fps consistently during gameplay? to help smooth out the stream even moreso.

BUT with all that said, i read the last paragraph and decided to watch the VOD back one more time, and sure enough it played back just fine at a fairly consistent 60fps. Im certain i had another stream open on my 3rd monitor while i was watching the VOD on my main monitor, which was likely causing an issue with playback. Regardless, i appreciate all the other info u gave me here! Cheers brother!

 

[BK-Morpheus]

Nice, glad to hear that.
Regarding the question, if you should further decease some in-game details, it comes to personal flavor. If your system holds 120fps ~90% of the time, I guess that would work for me, if it's more like ~80% of the time, I would either decrease some details or limit the fps to 60 and increase some details.