OBS Fix Display Capture not Working

I came across this issue today when trying to set up OBS on a new machine where trying to add a display capture and there was no output for the screen.

I found a fix, apparently this only affects laptops and it’s to do with the video card.

There’s a section buried in the settings to add custom options for apps located:

1Settings > System > Display > Graphics settings > Custom options for apps

in there is an option to ‘Add an app’, select ‘Desktop app’ then navigate to OBS mine is located here:

1C:\Program Files\obs-studio\bin\64bit\obs64.exe

OBS is now added to the all apps list, if I click on it I get two buttons ‘Options’ and ‘Remove’. Clicking the options I’m asked for Graphics preference with ‘Let Windows decide’ as the default.

Selecting the ‘Power saving’ option didn’t do anything for me so I enabled ‘High performance’ going back to OBS and closing and opening it again (classic) I could then see the display capture.

Here’s a video detailing the process:

This partly worked but I spent the next four hours trying to work out why my Twitch chat and alerts weren’t showing I found another solution in a video where I had to disable one of the graphics cards.

Modern laptops have two graphics cards one for high powered stuff like games and the other for browsing web pages. OBS doesn’t understand the difference between the two.

The next video I found covered a specific way to do it which involves going into the Device Manager (search Device Manager in the Windows menu) and finding the card I wanted to disable in the ‘Display Adapters’, there was two options for me AMD Radeon(TM) Graphics and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 I disabled the AMD one closed and reopened OBS and it was fine.

The video also details putting OBS into compatability mode I tried with and without and it made no difference for me so I left it how it was.

Here’s a detailed video going over all the points I mentioned and some other things you can try if you’re having a similar issue:

This was a real pain in the butt to work out. Hope it helps you too!