Is This Normal?

tictag

New Member
I have just installed OBS v29.0. Followed the Auto Configuration Wizard, selecting 'Virtual Camera Only', no custom profiles, no scenes, no sources, no plugins. On start, both my Intel Iris(R) Xe Graphics and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti onboard GPUs both jump to consuming 15% usage in Task Manager. Close OBS, both drop to near 0%.

Does the mere running of the OBS application consume 15% x 2 GPU capacity? Is this normal?

If not, how to troubleshoot?

David.

SYSTEM
Dell XPS 15 (Windows 10 Pro 22H2, Intel 12th Gen Core i9 12900HK CPU, 32GB RAM)
 

AaronD

Active Member
It's not 100%, is it? If everything you do fits into the budget, then it's fine.

Anyway, OBS is always rendering video. That's how the Preview window works, and a few other things. That's not free...

Since this is with nothing at all to render (not entirely true: you still have a black background, and that's still the full number of pixels), then it's entirely possible that that's the processing overhead. Static 15% load because of everything that it does to handle arbitrary content well, plus whatever the content is. You can't use overhead to estimate the content, as they're (almost) completely different things.
 
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tictag

New Member
It does seem to be related to the preview window. I have noticed that if I resize the OBS windows smaller, GPU usage (on both) goes down to about 9% and if I resize larger goes up to around 20%, maximising the window jumps GPU usage to nearly 30%. If I minimize the OBS application window, GPU drops to 0%.

I guess it must just be the 'cost' of the live preview (but even with no sources being displayed?) and I'll just have to keep the application minimized in use?
 

R1CH

Forum Admin
Developer
Percentage of GPU use is misleading without knowing the GPU clocks. 15% of 200 MHz is nothing to be worried about if the GPU clocks up to 2000 MHz when there is demand for it. It's a power saving measure.
 

tictag

New Member
Did some diagnostics with GPU-Z. Watch the video here.

Timestamps
0:00 System sat idle for 1 minute
1:00 Launched OBS
2:00 Enlarged OBS application window
2:55 Maximised OBS application window
3:30 Added a Video Source with NVIDIA Background Remover (NVIDIA Broadcast SDK) - heavy load

Points to note:
  • Overall: GPU clock frequencies on both GPUs remained largely idle until a heavy load was 'applied'
  • % GPU Load increases from 0% to 16% on application launch, idle GPU clocks (1:00)
  • % GPU Load increases from 16% to 34% enlarging preview window, idle GPU clocks (2:00)
  • % GPU Load increases from 34% to 41% maximising the preview window, slight increase in GPU[2] clock (2:55)
  • % GPU Load remains at 41%, significant GPU[2] clock increase under heavy load (3:30)
So OBS using up to 41% GPU capacity, depending on its application window size, but with GPUs remaining at idle clock speeds ... is this normal?
 
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AaronD

Active Member
So OBS using up to 41% GPU capacity, depending on its application window size, but with GPUs remaining at idle clock speeds ... is this normal?
As I said before, if everything you do fits into the budget, then it's fine. Only if you exceed 100% do you have a problem. Until then, continue to increase the settings or be happy that you have spare capacity.

Video production is a fairly constant load, so a big number is perfectly fine. For peaky things, you'll want to keep it lower, but a solid 90% is perfectly okay for us...provided that it doesn't throttle. (wouldn't want to add much more though, if you're sitting at 90%, but what you already have is okay; no need to pare it down)
 
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