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OBS says dropped frames but my internet is fine

Your speed test says you have plenty of upload. OBS still reports dropped frames and your stream still stutters. The two facts are not in conflict — they are measuring completely different things.

Last updated 29 August 2026

Two kinds of dropped frame, and only one is the network

OBS reports frames lost to encoding lag separately from frames lost to the network. Encoding lag means your computer could not compress the video in time — that is a CPU or GPU problem and no amount of bandwidth fixes it.

Network dropped frames mean something else entirely: the connection to the ingest server stalled long enough that the buffer overflowed and frames had to be thrown away. That is a latency and loss problem, and your speed number says nothing about it.

Why a speed test cannot tell you

A speed test measures how much data can move in a burst, when nothing else is happening, averaged over a few seconds. A stream has a completely different requirement: it must sustain its bitrate every second, for hours, while the rest of the house does whatever it likes.

A connection that averages 20 Mbps up but stalls for 400 ms whenever someone opens a large web page will test beautifully and drop frames all evening.

What to measure instead

1. Latency under load, on the upload side. If your latency climbs by hundreds of milliseconds while uploading, that is bufferbloat, and it is the most common cause of network dropped frames on an otherwise healthy line.
2. Packet loss. Even a fraction of a per cent forces retransmission on the RTMP connection, and the encoder's buffer pays for it.
3. Jitter. A bitrate that arrives unevenly is as bad as one that arrives late.
4. Whether anything else is uploading. Cloud photo backup is the classic invisible culprit — it saturates upload in bursts, exactly when you are least watching.

Setting a bitrate you can actually hold

1080p60 is roughly 6 Mbps of video and audio; 720p60 is nearer 4. Set your bitrate to about 70% of your measured upload, not 90 and never 100. A stream needs the headroom, and a clean 720p60 looks better to viewers than a 1080p60 that keeps buffering.

If your upload is under about 10 Mbps, 1080p60 is a fight you will keep losing. Drop to 720p60 and the stream becomes stable immediately.

Fixing the underlying problem

If latency under load is the cause, the fix is queue management on your router — the same fix as for bufferbloat generally, with the shaper set slightly below your real speeds. It is the single change most likely to end network dropped frames for good.