Unusual Frame Drops During Recording
Unusual Frame Drops During Recording
Hey there, this is my first time posting. I haven’t faced any issues with recording before. I recently reset my PC and got back into playing PS1 games using an emulator, and I wanted to record something. I opened OBS and started the game, but I noticed a slight lag during the recording. When I checked the preview, there were some occasional frame drops. Regardless of the settings I tried, drops kept happening. I’m sure it’s not my hardware—my specs are decent (RTX 3090 and i9 10900k).
I decided to try a different recording tool and used shadow play. Surprisingly, the same lag appeared again! I’ve never seen anything like this before. I checked the OBS stats panel, and there were no frame drops at all—just under 0.3% CPU usage. Now you might think it’s the game or emulator, so I changed both and still got the same noticeable lag.
For the frame drops, I recorded a few different games where they were quite obvious. To some people it might not seem big, but it bothers me a lot. I’ve shared two clips of gameplay here:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRWo2cdKFQY
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJ43sghB5go
(These drops become more noticeable after acceleration)
I’ve done a lot of research on frame drops, but no one has reported this issue before. I’m really confused and would appreciate some guidance.
As mentioned before, it works with any emulator. I tried ePSXe and DuckStation. I also overlooked that these performance issues only appear in the video output, not during gameplay. Here are my settings for both emulators:
https://imgur.com/a/bGEewhW
View: https://imgur.com/a/bGEewhW
So I conducted additional testing. Initially, I compared my emulator with a YouTube video on the same game and map. The frame lag appeared only on the actual emulator, while the video played smoothly.
EDIT: There were no "frame drops" on the emulator itself—it ran perfectly. Only the OBS preview/recording output showed issues.
Later, I tried test screen sharing on Discord. With multiple monitors, I placed Discord on the second monitor and initiated a screenshot. Keeping Discord open prevented the preview from disappearing. To my surprise, the frames were dropping similarly to what happened with OBS and shadowplay. This led me to suspect an issue with Windows.