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Stream Frame Drops
posted in Q/A Help
1
#1
0 Frags +

I've been noticing some serious frame drops for short intervals in the VODs of my stream despite not experiencing them myself ingame. StreamlabsOBS shows 0.1% frame drop to which I had assumed is likely due to some kind of mismatch over what "48fps" is which could either be a true 48 fps OR 47.952fps (23.976 x 2)a difference of 0.048fps which would be a 0.1% loss, but looking at my VODs I find things like this which wouldn't happen afaik if it was a frame rate mismatch between twitch and myself. Which even if that is how this issue is occuring it should occur every ~1000s (16m40s) which doesn't seem to be the case in my VODs. (advanced video stats for the VOD doesn't show any crazy upticks in frame drop matter of fact it shows 1 dropped frame during this)

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/295276853?t=00h58m06s
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/295276853?t=00h58m43s (between 58m45s and 58m48s)

I have some serious frame loss while peeking around the door looking at the enemy's ruins area by tunnel on lakeside. This frame loss only seems to occur for about 1-2s between 56m06s and 56m10s this happens at a few various points throughout my VODs. Even when there doesn't seem to be a whole lot going on.

StreamLabs OBS Specificiations/Details

  • Updated just before the refrenced VOD to 0.9.8 iirc issue was occurring before as well.
  • 1280x720 @48FPS
  • Filter: Lanczos (doesn't seem to have affected framerate/stability was on bilinear a few weeks ago)
  • Bitrate: 4750 Kbps // was at 5400Kbps when I first started streaming and tried fixing this and have tried 5200, 5000 and now 4750 issue seems -slightly- better (placebo?)
  • NVENC encoding
  • Audio bit rate: 160Kbps (not sure how this could possibly affect it more than the overall bitrate, but I have also tried 96Kbps)
  • Game Capture

Internet/Network Details

  • Speed 80Mbps x 25Mbps (even during peak hours)
  • I have tried both no QoS and QoS that favored twitch packets
  • I've monitored bandwidth on my port and I don't get anywhere close to maxing out bandwidth during streams
  • I have a wired connection
  • I'm not being DDoS'd at least not in the above reference and I'm certain I get to my ISPs network edge with no packet loss, reroutes, or bandwidth throttling. I seem to have not latency issues to the twitch server in chicago and I have no packet loss after testing for 8 hours.

PC Specificiations
Motherboard: Asus Z87-A ATX
CPU: Intel i7-4790K @4.7GHz
CPU Fan: Phanteks PH-TC14PE (max load temps are ~68C)
GPU: ASUS GTX 1070 8GB ROG STRIX OC

  • Driver Version: 398.11 (June 5th 2018)

Memory: G.Skill Sniper Series 32GB DDR3 1866MHz
PSU: Cooler Master VSM 650W 80+ Gold
OS: Windows 10 64-Bit (I'm using a very streamlined version of windows 10)

At this point I'm almost 100% sure it's a setting in streamlabs OBS or a mix of settings being to high and the hardware I have isn't fully capable of supporting what I'm using. Anyone have any suggestions? I'd immensely prefer to staying at 720p 48FPS but to achieve the kind of quality I want I can't really go to much lower than 4500 for bitrate.

-edit-

I've used the exact same hardware for local recordings in the last few months as well but with a bit rate of 12,000 1920x1080 60fps but otherwise same settings (except Lanczos I was using bilinear for this) and the issue didn't occur once in the ~22min recording

-edit2-

just realized my audio doesn't even stutter during the 2 examples I have so now I'm really beginning to wonder if it's hardware related or perhaps how OBS is recording the game (Game Capture vs Window Capture vs Display Capture)

I've been noticing some serious frame drops for short intervals in the VODs of my stream despite not experiencing them myself ingame. StreamlabsOBS shows 0.1% frame drop to which I had assumed is likely due to some kind of mismatch over what "48fps" is which could either be a true 48 fps OR 47.952fps (23.976 x 2)a difference of 0.048fps which would be a 0.1% loss, but looking at my VODs I find things like this which wouldn't happen afaik if it was a frame rate mismatch between twitch and myself. Which even if that is how this issue is occuring it should occur every ~1000s (16m40s) which doesn't seem to be the case in my VODs. (advanced video stats for the VOD doesn't show any crazy upticks in frame drop matter of fact it shows 1 dropped frame during this)

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/295276853?t=00h58m06s
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/295276853?t=00h58m43s (between 58m45s and 58m48s)

I have some serious frame loss while peeking around the door looking at the enemy's ruins area by tunnel on lakeside. This frame loss only seems to occur for about 1-2s between 56m06s and 56m10s this happens at a few various points throughout my VODs. Even when there doesn't seem to be a whole lot going on.

[u]StreamLabs OBS Specificiations/Details[/u]
[list]
[*] Updated just before the refrenced VOD to 0.9.8 iirc issue was occurring before as well.
[*] 1280x720 @48FPS
[*] Filter: Lanczos (doesn't seem to have affected framerate/stability was on bilinear a few weeks ago)
[*] Bitrate: 4750 Kbps // was at 5400Kbps when I first started streaming and tried fixing this and have tried 5200, 5000 and now 4750 issue seems -slightly- better (placebo?)
[*] NVENC encoding
[*] Audio bit rate: 160Kbps (not sure how this could possibly affect it more than the overall bitrate, but I have also tried 96Kbps)
[*] Game Capture
[/list]

[u]Internet/Network Details[/u]
[list]
[*] Speed 80Mbps x 25Mbps (even during peak hours)
[*] I have tried both no QoS and QoS that favored twitch packets
[*] I've monitored bandwidth on my port and I don't get anywhere close to maxing out bandwidth during streams
[*] I have a wired connection
[*] I'm not being DDoS'd at least not in the above reference and I'm certain I get to my ISPs network edge with no packet loss, reroutes, or bandwidth throttling. I seem to have not latency issues to the twitch server in chicago and I have no packet loss after testing for 8 hours.
[/list]

[u]PC Specificiations[/u]
Motherboard: Asus Z87-A ATX
CPU: Intel i7-4790K @4.7GHz
CPU Fan: Phanteks PH-TC14PE (max load temps are ~68C)
GPU: ASUS GTX 1070 8GB ROG STRIX OC
[list] [*] Driver Version: 398.11 (June 5th 2018) [/list]
Memory: G.Skill Sniper Series 32GB DDR3 1866MHz
PSU: Cooler Master VSM 650W 80+ Gold
OS: Windows 10 64-Bit (I'm using a very streamlined version of windows 10)

At this point I'm almost 100% sure it's a setting in streamlabs OBS or a mix of settings being to high and the hardware I have isn't fully capable of supporting what I'm using. Anyone have any suggestions? I'd immensely prefer to staying at 720p 48FPS but to achieve the kind of quality I want I can't really go to much lower than 4500 for bitrate.

-edit-

I've used the exact same hardware for local recordings in the last few months as well but with a bit rate of 12,000 1920x1080 60fps but otherwise same settings (except Lanczos I was using bilinear for this) and the issue didn't occur once in the ~22min recording

-edit2-

just realized my audio doesn't even stutter during the 2 examples I have so now I'm really beginning to wonder if it's hardware related or perhaps how OBS is recording the game (Game Capture vs Window Capture vs Display Capture)
2
#2
3 Frags +
over what "48fps" is

Unless OBS is doing something really crazy, 48 there really does mean 48 since they are omitting the NTSC unlike the 24 fps option. I would also imagine twitch wouldn't have any issue with a NTSC framerate either way, but I'm not a twitch engineer. You could always try setting the fps manually with the integer values option, if you really want to be sure, but again, I highly doubt that is the issue you have.

just realized my audio doesn't even stutter during the 2 examples

When you drop frames on twitch, you are just dropping visual frames not the audio stream, so that issue is just another confirmation that you are experiencing frame drops. As a side effect, this is how a viewer can tell that the streamer is having stream issues rather than their own issues which would cause the entire stream to freeze.

While I can't say for certain, I'm pretty sure your issue is a "it is how the internet works" issue and not a "you" issue, especially since your local recordings work fine. Just because your bandwidth isn't choked up doesn't mean any of the hops along the way to twitch aren't. Outside of paying for a business internet connection, which should solve issues from you to twitch, there really isn't much you can do to fix that issue. However, you can definitely try changing your twitch ingest server which can both change the hops your connection uses and give you a less congested server that can handle your stream without dropping.

[quote]over what "48fps" is[/quote]

Unless OBS is doing something really crazy, 48 there really does mean 48 since they are omitting the NTSC unlike the 24 fps option. I would also imagine twitch wouldn't have any issue with a NTSC framerate either way, but I'm not a twitch engineer. You could always try setting the fps manually with the integer values option, if you really want to be sure, but again, I highly doubt that is the issue you have.

[quote]just realized my audio doesn't even stutter during the 2 examples[/quote]

When you drop frames on twitch, you are just dropping visual frames not the audio stream, so that issue is just another confirmation that you are experiencing frame drops. As a side effect, this is how a viewer can tell that the streamer is having stream issues rather than their own issues which would cause the entire stream to freeze.

While I can't say for certain, I'm pretty sure your issue is a "it is how the internet works" issue and not a "you" issue, especially since your local recordings work fine. Just because your bandwidth isn't choked up doesn't mean any of the hops along the way to twitch aren't. Outside of paying for a business internet connection, which should solve issues from you to twitch, there really isn't much you can do to fix that issue. However, you can definitely try changing your twitch ingest server which can both change the hops your connection uses and give you a less congested server that can handle your stream without dropping.
3
#3
2 Frags +
Stochast1cover what "48fps" is
Unless OBS is doing something really crazy, 48 there really does mean 48 since they are omitting the NTSC unlike the 24 fps option. I would also imagine twitch wouldn't have any issue with a NTSC framerate either way, but I'm not a twitch engineer. You could always try setting the fps manually with the integer values option, if you really want to be sure, but again, I highly doubt that is the issue you have.
just realized my audio doesn't even stutter during the 2 examples
When you drop frames on twitch, you are just dropping visual frames not the audio stream, so that issue is just another confirmation that you are experiencing frame drops. As a side effect, this is how a viewer can tell that the streamer is having stream issues rather than their own issues which would cause the entire stream to freeze.

While I can't say for certain, I'm pretty sure your issue is a "it is how the internet works" issue and not a "you" issue, especially since your local recordings work fine. Just because your bandwidth isn't choked up doesn't mean any of the hops along the way to twitch aren't. Outside of paying for a business internet connection, which should solve issues from you to twitch, there really isn't much you can do to fix that issue. However, you can definitely try changing your twitch ingest server which can both change the hops your connection uses and give you a less congested server that can handle your stream without dropping.

This is an advantage I do have. I work for the ISP and have direct management access to every hop from my house to the border of my ISPs network until it's handed off to Cogent which has more than enough bandwidth at least to the edge of Chicago. Using tools to test speeds to Twitch's Chicago server suggest I should have significant upstream headroom over my current bitrate, but that may not be indicative of all days/hours or even minutes so I'll try a different server and see how it goes.

[quote=Stochast1c][quote]over what "48fps" is[/quote]

Unless OBS is doing something really crazy, 48 there really does mean 48 since they are omitting the NTSC unlike the 24 fps option. I would also imagine twitch wouldn't have any issue with a NTSC framerate either way, but I'm not a twitch engineer. You could always try setting the fps manually with the integer values option, if you really want to be sure, but again, I highly doubt that is the issue you have.

[quote]just realized my audio doesn't even stutter during the 2 examples[/quote]

When you drop frames on twitch, you are just dropping visual frames not the audio stream, so that issue is just another confirmation that you are experiencing frame drops. As a side effect, this is how a viewer can tell that the streamer is having stream issues rather than their own issues which would cause the entire stream to freeze.

While I can't say for certain, I'm pretty sure your issue is a "it is how the internet works" issue and not a "you" issue, especially since your local recordings work fine.[b] Just because your bandwidth isn't choked up doesn't mean any of the hops along the way to twitch aren't. Outside of paying for a business internet connection, which should solve issues from you to twitch,[/b] there really isn't much you can do to fix that issue. However, you can definitely try changing your twitch ingest server which can both change the hops your connection uses and give you a less congested server that can handle your stream without dropping.[/quote]

This is an advantage I do have. I work for the ISP and have direct management access to every hop from my house to the border of my ISPs network until it's handed off to Cogent which has more than enough bandwidth at least to the edge of Chicago. Using tools to test speeds to Twitch's Chicago server suggest I should have significant upstream headroom over my current bitrate, but that may not be indicative of all days/hours or even minutes so I'll try a different server and see how it goes.
4
#4
1 Frags +

It appears that StreamLabs OBS was set to "Auto" for server (I swear I had this manually set before, I know in my early July streams I definitely did cause I was still using regular OBS and checked that setting hasn't changed). I manually set it to Chicago US East and issue didn't occur the last time I streamed. According to streamlabs "Auto" is the best setting cause it automatically pick the "best" server lol more likely it picks the 1st "acceptable" server.

It appears that StreamLabs OBS was set to "Auto" for server (I swear I had this manually set before, I know in my early July streams I definitely did cause I was still using regular OBS and checked that setting hasn't changed). I manually set it to Chicago US East and issue didn't occur the last time I streamed. According to streamlabs "Auto" is the best setting cause it automatically pick the "best" server lol more likely it picks the 1st "acceptable" server.
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