Stuttering when recording or streaming Minecraft (OBS or Discord) with shaders enabled

[jcnnik]

Title

Severe stuttering when recording or streaming Minecraft (OBS or Discord) with shaders enabled

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Description

Whenever I start recording or streaming Minecraft (using OBS or Discord), the game immediately becomes extremely stuttery — frame pacing gets inconsistent and movement feels laggy.
The issue only occurs while capture is active and stops instantly once I end the stream or recording.

The problem mainly appears when using shaders (Complementary+sodium). Without shaders, gameplay is smooth.
My hardware (RX 7900 XTX + 7800X3D) easily handles the game, so this doesn’t seem like a performance bottleneck.
It feels more like a Windows capture or compositing conflict.

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Steps to Reproduce

1. Launch Minecraft 1.21.1 (Fabric)
2. Enable Complementary shaders
3. Start recording or streaming using OBS or Discord
4. Observe immediate stuttering and inconsistent frame pacing
5. Stop recording or streaming → issue disappears instantly

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Expected Behavior

Gameplay should stay smooth while recording or streaming, even with shaders enabled.

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Actual Behavior

The game becomes heavily stuttery and laggy during capture.

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System Details

• Minecraft version: 1.21.1
• Mod loader: Fabric
• Shader pack: Complementary
• GPU: AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D
• OS: Windows 11 25H2
• Display mode: tested both Fullscreen and Borderless Windowed
• OBS / Discord: latest versions

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Additional Notes

• Enabling VSync almost completely removes the stuttering, which is unexpected. 100 FPS with VSync has no less stutter than 120 Fps without VSync. (I dont mean Tearing)
• The Windows Snipping Tool (Win + Shift + S) also stutters when Minecraft is running, depending on the display mode — suggesting a possible Windows capture/composition issue. (Good indicator for this issue and easy to reproduce)
• Tested Cubes Without Borders and Borderless Fullscreen Mod → problem persists in both.
• Might be related to how capture tools hook into the graphics context when shaders are active.

[Bestsoft101]

Thank you for the detailed report, unfortunately I can't reproduce the issue, my recordings are smooth with the mod and with shaders.
Have you tried different capture methods in OBS? I'm using game capture, which works best for me, but I've heard that it doesn't work for some people, so they use window capture or screen capture instead.
Screen capture has an issue where recordings of fullscreen games get laggy when the FPS are low, this issue can be fixed by disabling Windows Fullscreen Optimizations in my mod, but it's not really the issue you described so I don't know if it would help.
To me it sounds more like a drivers issue. Maybe you have to update your graphics drivers, or maybe they messed something up in the newest version and you have to downgrade.

2025-11-11.11-51-55.mp4

[jcnnik]

Surprisingly the issue seems to be connected to using game capture. Capturing the entire screen with either discord or obs doesnt have stuttering. How is this possible tho or what could cause this issue?

[Bestsoft101]

I don't know