Game briefly "freezing" when streaming with OBS

jslowik · July 26, 2021

Hey all, I'm having trouble googling this one because it's not a hard failure, and it's pretty inconsistent. Just wondering if anyone has any thoughts or might have a suggested way to search for this one. I will preface by saying I am relatively clueless on most of this. I apologize for the disorganized mess that comes below, but I'm in over my head, apparently. Hope this i the right spot!

Anyway, I started streaming some of my gameplay (really so that if something cool and/or funny happens I can more easily share it, I'm bad and don't want anyone to actually watch ) and I am using OBS. I play at 4k and have v-sync on in game to sit at around 60fps. The issue is that occasionally during gameplay the game will "freeze" - the system is still responsive, can swap to other programs and whatnot - but the game itself will pause before eventually catching up. I see on OBS that the network indicator goes red. I'm just wondering what I've done wrong on my end that's causing this? Is there something I can do that if OBS has a network problem it can be prevented from causing the game to lock up as well? Or is the reality simply I'm asking too much from the system?

This issue does go away if I simply record locally, which also accomplishes what I want, but it involves more work on my end and would be nice if I could just figure out my streaming problem.

As for some settings that are hopefully relevant:

Bitrate set to 6000kbps
Encoder set to x264
CPU preset set to veryfast
Canvas resolution 3840x2160
Output resolution 1920x1080
Process priority normal
I was using display capture, but I've updated this to game capture (not yet tested if this has been the issue, if you think it may have been I would be happy to hear it)

Quick overall specs - no OC except xmp for ram:

3900x
64GB RAM
RTX 2080
Gigabit fiber and connected via wire

Thanks so much for your time!

Skiiwee29 · July 26, 2021

If you're going to want push 1080p on a single machine, you're best off using NVENC from your 2080 over CPU encoding. You're likely hitting a CPU encoding error and maxing out some cores causing the hitches. The NVENC encoder on the 2000 series is equal to x264 CPU encoding, so you will see no degradation to stream quality and impact should be minimal to game play experience.