I cannot figure out why my FPS is dropping with NVENC New all of a sudden and I'm going crazy.

Hello all,

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So, some back info. Recently we upgraded our internet (like 2 weeks ago) and I didn't upgrade any of my settings from what they were at the time, except ever so slightly.

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-NVENC (NEW) - CBR - 2500 Bitrate - Keyframe 2 - Max Quality - High - Bframes 2

-2560x1440 base canvas - 1280x720 - Lanczos -60fps

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Shortly after the internet change, I updated it to 3005 bitrate (i know it's a weird number, but it's the minimum recommended by the spread sheet that's been floating around) I didn't want to get risky, so I kept it simple and did this. For almost 2 weeks I've had no issues at all, so I decided to see just how good our internet had gotten.

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I changed to the following settings and had zero fps drops, no issues whatsoever during a 6 hour test stream (just used my bot account and played a game for a while, etc.)

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-NVENC (NEW) - CBR - 6k bitrate - Keyframe 2 - Max Quality - High - Bframes 2

-2560x1440 base canvas - 1920 x 1080 - Lanczos - 60fps

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No issues for the entire stream, was just playing WoW and leveling a character, etc.

The next day I had my follower friday and played jackbox games with my viewers and didn't run into a single issue until later that evening when my husband got home and started watching netflix. I started dropping fps, so I realized that maybe I can't be a badass and go all out.

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So, I changed my settings to as follows.

-NVENC (NEW) - CBR - 4kbitrate - keyframe2 - max quality - high - bframes 2

-2560x1440 base canvas - 1280 x 720 - Lanczos - 60fps

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However, ever since I changed it from the awesome settings I've had nothing but a complete sh*t show of dropped frames on my hands. I have no idea what to do, I'm going crazy. If anything it should be more stable with less of a load, but it's not.

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Today I played Hollow Knight on stream (like...no system stress from that game, could probably run it on a phone) I streamed for 9hours and had 147 or so error alerts in streamlabs obs. Before tonight I never saw my frames drop unless I was having internet issues, always a solid 60fps in streamlabs, but now it's struggling to hold 50fps, if we're lucky. The only other thing I've changed during all of this was adding a stream boss to my channel, which was the last thing I thought it could be, but with my thorough testing I removed it.

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I've noticed that if I disable my webcam, I keep a solid 60fps. It's not just this game either, I swapped around games and the fps tanked when I was messing with deadly premonition, I'm talking about a slide show, basically 12-40fps in streamlabs. (i had no issue in game at all).

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I can't stress that I have not had this issue before until lowering my settings. I have restarted my network multiple times (leaving it off for 30 minutes even) and my streamtests seem to show up fine, except when I see the fps tanks and i get the incompatibility report in the streamer tool.

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-I have tried deleting the web cam from my scene and re-adding it.

-I've tried deleting the streamlabs cache / restarting

-I've tried deleting the webcam - clearing the cache - uninstalling streamlabs/reinstalling - then re-adding

-I've tried swapping from CBR to VBR, because I wasn't 100% sure which I had it set on before I pumped up the settings, but it didn't matter.

-I've tried lowering my webcam resolution to 640x360 (even though I was running it at 1080p along with my game, etc before lowing the settings)

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Cam (Logitech C920) - Custom - 640 x 360 - Match output FPS - MJPEG - Default - Partial - Auto Detect - Use custom audio device - name of device

-i've tried going back to the exact settings i had before changing anything at all

-I've tried restarting my pc between all of these steps

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The last bit of information I can think of sharing is, like I said a couple of days ago I didn't have a single issue. My hardware specs are more than capable or I wouldn't have been able to stream 1080p 60fps for hours with no issues while playing an even more hardware intensive game than hollow knight.

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The thing is, though...if I swap to the old Nvenc it works, I have no issues, but obviously later on if I want to stream at a higher quality, I'll have issues not being able to use the new version. Our internet is just barely good enough that with Nvenc new if I wanted to, I could do 1080p60fps for a specific game if it was during a time that I was the sole internet user.

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I'd really appreciate any possible help, I've been messing with this for like 5 hours now and I have no more ideas of what could fix it. I'm tempted to swap to obs studio, because I'm going crazy, but streamlabs just has so many great things included.

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Screenshots of all settings pages : https://imgur.com/a/Mh3DgCq

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Please let me know if you need anything else.

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Thanks for any and all help.

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Edit: added speccy hardware screenshot as well, and uploaded the correct screenshot of my output settings (it was showing 2500 bitrate, but it is not set to that)

Edit2: And just for clarification, if I bump the settings back up to bad ass level it does not fix it, it's horrible.Edit3: I spent a crazy long time messing with this tonight, and I've come to the conclusion that I must have had a different Webcam Video format before I made all of the changes. Perhaps I thought I could upgrade those settings as well. However, when I go to change the video format, I don't recognize any of those names, and it doesn't matter anyway, because they all suck. However, I research at bit and in a video someone mentions that NV12 is low CPU usage, and that name does ring a bell. I could be wrong, but I sort of remember that. I just remember (hopefully this rings a bell for someone) that before changing the format, I could never take my video resolution higher than 640 x 360. If I did the picture of my face would just be frozen until I dropped the resolution back that low, so I just assumed that's all that codec could handle and I should leave it alone. It wasn't until I tried MJPEG that I realized I could even increase the resolution without the logitech capture software (which I no longer use, because it'd lag my camera out like crazy on stream)

Sorry for the mess of info, I'm going nuts, and the only thing that seems to definitely always make it work is turning the webcam off, but I had been streaming for weeks with no issue with my webcam, so something has gone wrong. I don't know if there was an update with streamlabs, or an update with logitech, but I have to be missing a video format driver that I can't go back to. Is there any way to see what video format driver I was using like a week ago?

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Edit 3: I installed OBS Studio and used the exact same settings with nvenc new - no issues whatsoever. I don't know if the recent update to streamlabs obs is causing the issue, but I cannot on any settings use my webcam now without it tanking FPS. Oddly, I can stream witcher 3 at max settings, 60fps 720p no frame drops, but if I go to hollow knight, or deadly premonition it dies, but...this issue doesn't exist on OBS studio, all games play completely fine. :/

If anyone knows what could be the cause, I'd really like to stay with streamlabs, because I prefer it, but this isn't fair to my viewers to say, yeah i know you bought me a camera, but I'm not using it. :/

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I have also now rolled back drivers for my gpu as well, that did not solve the issue. I did that before trying OBS studio.