Running GTA RP on its own is already demanding. Running GTA RP with OBS recording is asking two hungry programs to share the same processor. If your FiveM only stutters when you hit record, the problem is almost never a broken OBS install — it is the configuration making them fight over the same resource.
The good news is that most of the gain comes from three settings, and the first one alone fixes a lot.
1. The encoder: the setting that matters most
By default OBS uses x264, which encodes video on the CPU. And FiveM is precisely a CPU-bound game: the engine leans heavily on one core, and in a busy city that core is already at its limit. Asking x264 to share it is the recipe for stuttering.
The fix is using your graphics card's encoder, which has dedicated hardware for the job and barely touches the CPU:
- NVIDIA — NVENC (H.264 or HEVC). Available from the GTX 900 series onward.
- AMD — AMF/VCE.
- Intel — QuickSync, useful if you have integrated graphics enabled alongside a dedicated card.
In OBS: Settings, Output, Advanced mode, Streaming or Recording tab, Encoder field. Switching from x264 to NVENC often gives back dozens of frames per second in game with no visible quality loss.
2. Cap your in-game FPS
It sounds backwards, but it helps. If you play at 200 FPS and record at 60, the computer is producing 140 frames per second nobody will ever see — and each one consumes CPU that OBS needs.
Capping the game at two or three times your recording framerate gives the system headroom and, in practice, makes frametime more consistent. Fewer but steadier frames means a smoother stream and a less choppy game.
If you record at 60, capping the game between 120 and 144 is a good starting point.
3. Capture mode and window mode
Two choices that interact with each other:
Game Capture is more efficient than Display Capture because it pulls frames straight from the GPU buffer instead of photographing the desktop. Use "Capture specific window" pointed at FiveM.
Borderless window makes capture and alt-tab easier, but costs a little performance compared to exclusive fullscreen. Fullscreen yields more frames, though on some setups capture fails or goes black.
Practical recommendation: start with borderless. If performance is tight, test fullscreen and check that capture still works.
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4. Where the recording is saved
A detail that ruins plenty of recordings and nobody suspects. If OBS writes to the same drive FiveM is reading its cache from, the two compete for disk access. On a hard drive this is fatal, and on a saturated SSD it shows up too.
Record to a different drive from the one running the game. If you only have one, at least keep plenty of free space — recording onto a nearly full disk hitches.
5. Honest bitrate
Bitrate that is too high improves nothing if your connection cannot sustain it. The result is dropped frames on the stream, which viewers see as stuttering — and you end up blaming the game.
A safe rule: use at most 70% of your real upload. Test the actual upload, not what you are paying for. For 1080p at 60 frames, 6000 to 8000 kbps is the usual range.
What is specific to GTA RP
Three things set RP apart from other games when streaming:
Long sessions. RP streams run four, six, eight hours. That changes what matters: temperature and stability outweigh peak FPS. A PC holding 200 frames for the first twenty minutes and dropping to 90 by hour three has a thermal problem, not a graphics settings problem.
Voice throughout. You are on the microphone constantly, and FiveM's voice system runs in the same process as the game. A saturated CPU does not only drop FPS, it drops audio with it — and choppy voice ruins an RP scene.
A busy city is the worst moment. Exactly when the content is good, performance is at its worst. Configure for the bad case, not for a test in an empty city.
If it still stutters
After those adjustments, if the game keeps hitching with OBS open, the bottleneck stopped being configuration and became the system. The suspects, in order:
- Windows power plan holding back CPU frequency
- High DPC Latency from a misconfigured driver, causing hitches independent of load
- Background processes competing for the processor
- High temperature reducing frequency over the session
None of those show up in OBS or in the game settings. They only show up when you measure.
Frequently asked questions
In most cases because OBS is using the x264 encoder, which processes video on the CPU — the same resource FiveM already saturates, since the engine depends heavily on one core. Switching to NVENC, AMF or QuickSync moves encoding to the graphics card and gives performance back to the game.