I5 3570k performance with OBS (game capture)

So I decided to test out OBS today and see what kind of performance hit it would take. This wasn't intended on being a full write up and as i've spent about 6 hours messing with OBS today this is just essentially a haphazard list of my findings. Wasn't sure where else to post so as this was primarily testing the CPU I thought it could go here :) Mods feel free to move to more appropriate category if suitable.

The game under test was Alien Isolation.

These are my computer specs:
i5 [email protected]
Noctua U14S
8gb DDR3 corsair vengance @ 1600
GTX 980
Asus P8Z77V -LK
Dell U3415w.

I had to change the desktop resolution from 3440x1440 (native) to 2560x1440. Then adjust the ingame resolution from there. This is due to the 21:9 aspect ratio creating black bars in OBS. The 2560x1440 allows for 16:9 and no black bars on recording with OBS.

Test 1:
Native Resolution: 2560x1440
Downscaled: 1920x1080
FPS: 60FPS
Result: Choppy and terribly poor gameplay and capture. I used the x264 codec as well as nvidia codec. Neither worked very well.

Test 2:
Native Resolution: 2560x1440
Downscaled: 1920x1080
FPS: 30PS
Result: x264 was still unsuable. The Nvidia codec worked surprisingly well, the gameplay was pretty smooth but there was a horrible bloom effect that wasn't quite ghosting but was still absolutely horrid to look at. This was the nvidia codec behaving well.

Test 3:
Native Resolution: 1920x1080
Downscaled: 1920x1080
FPS: 60PS
Result:SCPU usage still going up to 100% straight away and semi choppy and stuttery gameplay. Nvidia codec still giving bad examples of bloom.

Test 4:
Native Resolution: 1920x1080
Downscaled: 720p
FPS: 30PS
The x264 codec was viable at this resolution. It produced acceptable quality footage that didn't stutter both in gameplay and in game. The Nvidia codec also worked very well in game but while the recordings were better they are still not as sharp as the x264. Through fairly fast mouse movements from side to side the bloom comes back, not as significantly as higher resolutions but still noticeable enough for it to look bad on the recording. CPU usage sat at around 60-70% sometimes spiking to 100. Exampleof the x264 quality.

I was also recording with a microphone as well and had a chrome browser open as, personally i'll be also recording with a facecam also (which I don't have yet). I was attempting to use up a little extra ram and cpu cycles to emulate that.

Outcome:
An i5 is ok to record with at 1920x1080p with the x264. With the settings I used - can post screenshots if people would like to see I was getting good framerates and quality local recordings. The Nvidia Codec doesn't really hold up in terms of quality but the smoothness of the recording is better than the x264.

If anyone has some experience with game capture who would like to chime in on the most efficient way to record locally please do! I'm all ears I'd ideally like to record locally at 1080p 60fps and apart from upgrading to a i7 4790k or X99 system i'm not sure how. (I did look into game capture but i don't think they would work with my setup).

My aim is to be able to capture gameplay at 1920x1080 natively at 60 fps, starting with Alien Isolation and for it to be of high enough quality to put on youtube that looks professional.

Request:
If someone has an i7 and alien isolation if you could please do a recording at 1920x1080p downscaled to 720p at 60 frames just so I could get an idea of the performance that would be very much appreciated!

If you are doing x264 encoding, it's going to eat up cpu cycles that may or may not be an issue. It might be interesting know what games you are playing since that does make a difference.

As for my own recommendations with OBS is to either play with Quicksync, since you have it in your chip and it's basically using up energy from something that isn't used in anyway. The only issue with it is that it isn't the prettiest of encoders, and typically the video that comes out of it is usable (for streams), but not beautiful. As it stands currently x264 is the more pretty encoder, but at a price.

nVidia's NEVC thing works very well in my opinion, though it has the same issues with quality as Intel's Quick Sync. But usually that can be fixed by bumping up the bitrate. The only issue with that is that it becomes a space and bandwidth issue (if you record to a shitty HDD like I do).

My own personal issue with OBS recording really do stem from that hard drive, because I'm trying to record at 60 FPS, even though I have the GPU power (using NEVC), I'm bottlenecked by the HDD, which causes video that is stutter once it isn't able to stream data onto the HDD.

Info you should provide... full specs of computer, resolution you actually game at, all encoding settings and the advanced settings.

To record on some rigs just requires sacrifice, I can record with NEVC in BF4 even on my 650Ti Boost, my settings just aren't the prettiest.

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I haven't tried Quicksync yet but it is something I will try.

I'll also try to up the bitrate for the NEVC settings as well. Super tired now so i'll put up all the settings I used tomorrow (took screen caps).

I have an SSD I can capture to however it's only 256gb and the bulk of my active steam games are on there but I can move things around. Very new to the whole game capture business so it's all learning for me.

I'm thinking of upgrading to an i7 4790k or a 5820k to make things easier.

Edit:

Upon your recommendation I just tried the NEVC codec with an upped bitrate and recorded locally to SSD and it's actually...... decent! The gameplay and playback is both smooth, I think this might be the way to go. Thanks!

You'll need to watch the bitrate in, do some gameplay and find some areas where things get fast/exciting and see if it artifacts (those anying blocks). If it does, you'll need to bump up bitrate even moreif you want perfect video.

If you don't like thelarge filesizes, yiu can later compress them with little to no loss of quality with Handbrake or some thing similar, or like I do it with the x264 or ffmpeg encoder and a batch file or two.

I thought I was doing good. I have a 860k and a r7 260x.. I had my Bitrate set to 10000 thinking ya that should do it. I was saving it locally not streaming. I started up BF was doing good not getting any lag. I was like Ya this is awesome. I go back and watch my newly made gameplay video.... 20minutes of Black screen =)

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You might not have set up the scenes and sources correctly.

I did, I Tried to a second time but watched my OBS it was giving me the High CPU encoding warning and the preview was freezing and only copying a frame every 5 seconds or so. I finally got it to run stead but I had to downscale to 480p I guess I will have to actually buy a game capture device

Naw, what you can do is change some of the settings.

Run the bitrate at around 7000, turn off CBR and set quality to around 7-10, go to the advanced tab and change the x264 preset to superfast.

See what that does, it might help.

Sweet I may try that thanks =)

I thought I might mention that I'm doing my capturing on a 650Ti Boost, with 8 GB or system memory and a Pentium G3258 as the CPU.

I did do some x264 encoding with my FX-8320, and it came out very well, but the cost in game was insane. It could maintain itself to a certain point in small battles in Planetside 2, but struggled otherwise. But still, beautiful footage. I might mention that rig as an SSD that it was writing to, which helps with video that has a very high bitrate.

Im using the 860k 16gigs of ram with r7 260x using 7200 rpm HDD does 127MBs well thats what dxtory told me. I tired that also it didn't work very well. Maybe its something to do with AMD. Having 2 extra cores than your pentium should have no problem but the Intel has better IPC performance

This just confirms what people have been saying for a long time. You want a Quad + hyper threading to do x264 encoding. Quicksync or the nvec codec is your best bet. Nvec setup just right is pretty good, although for this setup I'd not even consider anything outside of Quicksync. I run x264 on my Xeon 1231-v3 with little performance hit, and thats just the most sense able solution in my situation.

Yeah NVEC or Quicksync ftw, x264 is no doubt the better of the group, for footage that you want at the maximum quality for editing, nothing beats it. But NVEC and Quicksync are very good for streaming, and footage that has to be watchable but not perfect. Now if only AMD rolled out something similar... that would be nice.

They use to have two encoders the VCE and APP but in 15.7 drivers they are no longer supported.

I had a quick chat to another youtuber and he said that he doesn't do any encoding while capturing. He captures lossless and then encodes afterwards. Was thinking Dxtory might be good for this?

fraps would be better. it records RAW

but dxtory works too. I found dxtory is a bit more laggy than fraps

but fraps is 39 bucks

But remember you are recording in RAW your files will be HUGE

Dxtroy with the right settings is far faster and better quality than fraps, and I own Dxtroy after trying everything out it was the best. Ninja Edit: Dxtroy if you let it will generate files at a rate of around 5gb per minute so yeah watch out for that, it does RAW as well.

Also running an amd FX-6100 @3.8 and I stream perfectly at 1080p 60fps with zero frame drop out of OBS on Rocket League, the only real game I have been streaming it might impact others but so far zero issues.

If you don't mind me asking how do you have your settings set up in Dxtory I would like to try this

Currently I have it set to encode h.264 on the fly while recording but using a plugin and not default settings. For raw there is a radio button to switch from AVI to RawCap on the right under video tab. But Dxtroy having not toyed enough since my reinstall is still capturing at 30fps and not 60, should still be good for that but no tried recently.

Also that 6100 is teamed up with an R9 290 pushing 2080x1536 resolution sending the files to an unused mechanical drive so not much issue with the drive no keeping up.

This link here has the info. http://www.dayzrp.com/t-How-to-record-with-Dxtory-with-the-x264-codec

I downloaded dxtory because I was using OBS and couldn't get a good clear image with my setup but I used the demo of fraps and it was clear without any lag. Someone told me to do Dxtory and told me how to set it up for lossless I kept getting jitters in the recording. it was using the x264 encoder. I was hoping there was a way to not encode the image I would do that later with handbrake