Arc A770 - Choppy video capture with AV1

[grega125]

Hi,

I am new to this forum and I also recently bought the Asrock Phantom Gaming A770 16GB. The issue looks like there are frames being skipped in capture. I use RivaTuner to lock fps to 60 and analyze the frametime graph. There are no spikes (no such photos attached). It happens in every recording and is intermittent. I don't know what triggers it. I attached a video of me playing Forza Motorsport, which I captured with OBS (AV1 enc.). I used OBS because I started having issues with dark screen when using Arc Control capture (video also included). But when Arc Control capture worked it suffered the same symptoms. I noticed this weeks ago and tried to fix it. I tried all the encoders in Arc Control (AVC,HEVC,AV1), different bitrates. In the game I tried -> locked and unlocked framerate, vsync on,off in game. Vsync forced in Arc Control, smooth vsync. I also felt like it could be my AMD cpu so I tried PBO on,off-> no difference. I scanned my Samsung SATA SSD with their software, which found no issues. I also tested my RAM. Issue was the same with driver 5382.

I found that this card has the smoothest gameplay when it's running at 80-95% activity. Above that it gets sort of unstable. If I unlock the framerate my GPU actitivity is 99% so I would say I don't have a CPU bottleneck, but it does that similar "skipping frames" thing as in capture. Interestingly though when running benchmarks such as 3DMark and Unigines superposition, the rendering is smooth.

With most games I like to avoid VSYNC since it causes high latency and the best thing to remedy that is lowering the graphics settings and locking fps to 120. Even though I'm using a 60Hz monitor. So to summarize this, not using VSYNC makes games choppy and using it makes all my actions delayed to the point where it's unplayable.

PC specs, software settings and some bios settings are included in screenshots.zip attachment.

Another thing: I tried reinstalling the GPU drivers multiple times and I also used DDU in safe mode.

So after all that the main issue bothering me, is the one mentioned in the title and everything else I can live with.

Best regards

Grega

[grega125]

Today I followed this up with a game called Insurgency Sandstorm on Steam. I captured some data with CapFrameX software, although I couldn't use the configuration file as it kept being auto deleted. There are two samples. One is running at 60FPS and the other at 120FPS. In this game frame skipping seems to happen less often than in Forza Motorsport and is also more visible at 60FPS. I suspect this is because skipped frames at 60FPS input give around 30FPS output meanwhile 120FPS input with skipped frames would still be at around 60FPS making the video smoother and so more difficult to spot inconsistencies.

I am sharing the videos with Onedrive as they're above the size limit here: Download videos - Onedrive

There are two CapFrameX files. They were recorded with gameplay and it should be clear by the framerate, to which video a file corresponds. As previously I am including screenshots of settings used in the game and in Arc Control. Note that I used Smooth VSYNC in this game but I used in-game VSYNC in Forza Motorsport. The result is reduction in app latency by at least 10ms.

To notice the problem I recommend using a 60Hz monitor so it is the closest to my setup.

60FPS video: problem occurs at around 1:48 mark

120FPS video: around 0:36 and 2:11 marks

There could be more occurrences but I didn't spot them. I used Windows Media Player and VLC to spot the problem.

Also for anybody wondering why my game is running with DX12. You can add a launch argument in steam "-dx12" because this game is running on UE4 engine thus making it run A LOT BETTER than with DX11.

Edit: adding another video with CapFrameX capture file of Forza Motorsport: Download video Forza Motorsport - Onedrive

Reason why I think it is the GPU driver, is because I didn't have this problem before with a GTX 1060 when recording HEVC at similar bitrate. It is true that now, that I have this card, I use higher graphics settings which stress the CPU more - it is not ruled out yet. This is also now fully beyond my scope of knowledge.

[grega125]

You're not intelligent enough ChatGPT.

[ACarmona_Intel]

Hello Grega125,

Thank you for posting in our communities.

Please generate an SSU report to help me further analyze important details on your system, such as the OS build number, complete model of your system, etc. To generate the SSU report, please refer to the article: How to Get the Intel® System Support Utility Logs on Windows. Please send us the generated SSU.txt file.

After providing your SSU, I will raise the case with our engineers, and by the way, all the information and files that you have shared were highly noted and appreciated; we will use them to further investigate our issue.

Thank you, and have a great day ahead!

Best regards,

Carmona A.

Intel Customer Support Technician

[grega125]

Hello,

I am sending you the SSU report. It seems some information is not available in the SSU report so I am also including an MSINFO report.

[ACarmona_Intel]

Hello Grega125,

Thank you so much for providing us with your SSU and other relevant files and information that we can use to further investigate the issue.

We will now do further research on the issue and post the response on this thread once it is available.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Best regards,

Carmona A.

Intel Customer Support Technician

[ACarmona_Intel]

Hello Grega125,

Based on our observation, you have 4 drives in the system (3 SATA SSDs and 1 SATA HDD). 

And Windows is installed on the 2 TB Samsung SATA SSD, and since it is the biggest drive, may we know if you have installed games there as well as saved recordings?

And also, is it possible if you could share with us a record of the other SATA SSDs? This is to rule out that it is not the cause of the stutter, as the SATA (Samsung) drive might not be able to keep up with the demands of recording the game (since it has the OS installed on it and possibly the game and recording on it).

Furthermore, please provide us with your OBS recording settings so we can try replicating on our end (e.g., Bitrate).

Some additional observations that we wanted to share with you:

• In the Insurgency Sandstorm recording (Sandstorm_120fps_lock.mkv), you have mentioned the stutter at the 0:36 mark, and we noticed that the CPU utilisation increased from 46% to 87% and GPU utilisation decreased from 81% to 78%. CPU utilisation got as high as 95% and then dropped to 69% at the 0:42 mark. We did not notice any stutter at Mark 2:11, as you have mentioned. There might be some background process that triggers this or a possible OBS recording bottleneck, as mentioned above.

Best regards,

Carmona A.

Intel Customer Support Technician

[grega125]

Hello,

I am glad you are helping me. So this is my storage configuration:

C disk: 2TB Samsung SATA which runs windows, games and yes also ran recordings. I had the other drives full most of the time so it had to.

D disk: old 1TB 2.5in HDD taken out of a laptop

F disk: 2x240GB SATA SSDs running windows raid to get more storage for cheap

I tried what you said. First time I tried recording with OBS to drive F. Same thing happened, video is attached. Second time I tried recording to the D disk, which fixed the issue.

As far as Insurgency Sandstorm goes I have to agree with you that it doesn't have this problem. I suppose it loads most of the game in memory (and it seems those stutters were caused by CPU). Now Forza Motorsport already requires an NVME SSD to run high settings. So this could be a part of the reason.

I am happy the issue is fixed. I would have not even considered recording to the inferior drives, even though they were not loaded while gaming.

You asked for the bitrate settings in OBS but you can't adjust bitrate manually there. You can only adjust the quality settings, which I set to "Indistinguishable quality, large file size". I think there's a screenshot of it in one of the first two posts.

Recordings: Download recordings from OneDrive

Best regards,

Grega

[ACarmona_Intel]

Hello Grega125,

Thank you so much for following the recommendation that we have provided. The information that you have shared has been highly noted.

By the way, may we know if you still need our assistance or if you already wish to close the case? If yes, we will close the case for you.

Thank you, and have a great day ahead!

Best regards,

Carmona A.

Intel Customer Support Technician

[ACarmona_Intel · Accepted solution]

Hello Grega125,

Again, may we know if you still need our assistance or if you already wish to close the case? If yes, we will close the case for you.

Thank you, and have a great day ahead!

Best regards,

Carmona A.

Intel Customer Support Technician

[ACarmona_Intel]

Hello Grega125,

We have not heard back from you, so we will conclude that you no longer need our assistance. For additional information, please submit a new question, as this thread will no longer be monitored.

By the way, we wanted to express our gratitude for your help and thoughtfulness during our investigation into the problem's underlying cause.

Bye for now, and have a great day!

Best regards,

Carmona A.

Intel Customer Support Technician