Games lag when streaming

[hecsagon]

I'm sorry to bump an old thread but it's relevant to an issue I'm currently experiencing

I'm playing F-Zero GX and it works brilliantly when I'm not streaming. But when I try to stream, regardless of how high or low my stream settings, it lags and the sound distorts. I understand with the current version of dolphin, there are some inevitable yet brief hiccups when the game starts and at the character selection screen. However, the lag and distortion I'm experiencing when streaming is occurring during gameplay which is unusual. I would think that my PC is too weak, except CPU and GPU % usage are both read under 50% when the lag and distortion is happening. I saw a post from an old thread in 2015 where someone said disabling the stream preview in OBS solved their lag issue, and I tried this but it didn't change a thing for me. Any ideas on how to fix my dolphin streaming lag/distortions? I have Ryzen 2700 cpu and RTX 2070 gpu with 16gb of ram. Thank you

[Shonumi]

I went ahead and made this a separate thread (it's better for visibility, attracts more eyeballs and help).

About your PC specs, Dolphin won't use 100% of your hardware's resources like that. These days, it should only use 2 CPU cores maximum for the majority of its work, and Dolphin is actually pretty performant using 1 CPU cores for modern rigs. So seeing CPU usage at less than 50% is misleading. 25% CPU usage on a Ryzen 2700 (8-cores) could mean that the two CPUs running Dolphin are both saturated at 100% You'd best examine what the CPU usage is for each core when streaming, make sure none is pegging 100%. Windows Task Manager does not show this information by default, but you can right-click the graph in the Performance tab and go to Change graph to -> Logical Processes.

Having said that, I can't imagine why something like this is happening. Your CPU and GPU should be very solid for Dolphin. Out of curiosity, have you tried different streaming software? That might narrow down whether it's a Dolphin-based issue, or something to do with OBS.

[mimimi]

Hmm, don't nvidia GPUs have built in stuff for streaming? Maybe you need to change some setting in your streaming software, so that it actually streams in an efficient way.

In order to get a tiny bit more performance from your cpu, you could try to pin Dolpin to one of your cpu's CCX. On Ryzen 2xxx communication between CCX might be an issue. The 1st 4 cores(8 threads) should be on one CCX and the other cores should be on the other CCX. If the streaming software needs the cpu to transfer data from Dolphin, you might want to try to pin Dolphin and the streaming software to the same CCX. Theoretically Dolphin and the streaming software wouldn't use more than 4 cores anyways. Another thing to try would be to pin Dolphin just to the physical cpu cores of one of the CCX.

You can pin software to cpu cores in task manager. Under processes you should be able to rightclick the process and set the affinity to the cores that you want.

[JMC47]

Using modern streaming software, even PS1 emulators lag for me when streaming on my core i7-6700K. Something's weird about their screen capture that makes streaming emulators a pain in the ass right now. This didn't used to happen.