GPU encoding gets overloaded based on game's FPS (B580)

[Ptage]

Hi, I made a stream on my account with these OBS settings and found very, very weird behavior of the GPU. 

Stream VOD here

OBS stream runs with the following settings:

Stream Twitch: Quicksync H.264, 6Kbps, default settings, Scaling from 1440p60fps into 1080p60fps using Lanchos.

Recording to file (at the same time): Quicksync AV1, 1440p60fps, 12Kbps.

You can notice that during gameplay, as long as there is more than 80-90fps, the encoding doesn't get overloaded and everything runs smoothly.

However, when the game's fps drops to around 60fps, the encoder gets overloaded and recording is unwatchable. What's interesting is that the overloaded encoder happens when the frame time and GPU busy match on the PresentMon, meaning that it's probably some driver bug -- when game gets demanding, GPU pushes so much power into rendering that it doesn't leave enough room for encoding task. I think it should instead balance these two tasks regardless of in-game fps, encoding should be working fine even if I have 10 in-game fps.

Once the game's fps is above 90fps (refer to beginning or end of the video), everything records smoothly -- notice how GPU busy is below frame time graph at these times. 

[Earl_Intel]

Hi Ptage,

Thank you for posting in the communities!

To better assist you and determine the most appropriate resolution, could you please provide the needed details listed below:

• May I know if OBS is working fine before?
• Can you provide us the game settings that you are using while playing Cyberpunk 2077?

Kindly run this on your system so that I can also gauge the following peripherals and the driver versions that you have:

Intel® System Support Utility for Windows*

Once finished downloading, open the tool, click on scan (leave the default items checked), click next, then save the system information to a .txt file. Please provide us the .txt file.

Best regards,

Earl E.

Intel Customer Support Technician

[Ptage]

Hi, I attach the scan.

1. OBS is generally working fine. It shows the issue of encoder overload, but it doesn't mean that there is some misconfiguration of hardware, etc. It just indicates that the GPU encoder can't keep up/its performance isn't enough to capture the recording smoothly and it may drop frames.

2. The issue isn't exclusive to Cyberpunk 2077 or its specific settings. The issue occurs when any game's framerate hits 30-40fps (exact range will vary a bit per game). So the issue isn't possible to replicate if we record a non-demanding game that will have 60+fps on highest settings, but any modern title should be good for that task.

[Earl_Intel]

Hi Ptage,

Thank you for providing the SSU logs, I will further check on this internally.

I will provide an update on this thread as soon as possible.

Best regards,

Earl E.

Intel Customer Support Technician

[Revocatalyst]

Got B580 last week, similar issues happened while playing Black Hawk Down and Avowed. I hope Intel is still monitoring this issue. Have you get any ideas rn? I plan to test further, before saw this thread, I considered it may caused by high utilization, but I don't notice similar issue when playing the same game at 1080p.

[Ptage]

Hi, an update to the issue.

Turning off HAGS in Windows resolved the problem.

I did not replicate the problem after turning off HAGS with these encoder settings:

Quicksync AV1

Rate control ICQ

ICQ quality 23

Resolution 2560x1440

Framerate: 60