Amarec recording test

Since early into this year (and, to a lesser extent, some of last year as well), my game capture setup has had this annoying stuttering problem. Depending on circumstances I have no idea about, sometimes it would stutter constantly (like in my Namco Museum Encore longplay video), while other times it wouldn't be as bad. I initially was going to just deal with it, but it's gotten so irritating that I wanted to see if there were ways I could fix it, without having to empty my wallet. I happen to own a secondary capture card and the stuttering happens with that one too, so I'm confident in saying it's not the capture card itself (keep in mind the main capture card I use is a GVUSB2, and it's the same one I've been using since 2017). My PC is a few months away from being 6 years old, but something tells me it's not that either. I initially thought it could've been the Composite splitters I was using, and was almost about to order some new ones from Amazon, but I also wondered if maybe it was an issue with OBS. So, I downloaded Amarec, and from what I can tell, no stuttering seems to occur when running my game feed through Amarec, which means it most likely has something to do with how my capture card is being output through OBS. (Though, I'm nowhere near an expert in this field, so if someone has any advice, please let me know.)

This is not a direct recording from Amarec, but rather a recording of my Amarec window through OBS. Audio was achieved by adding a separate Game Capture source, selecting the Amarec window as the window to capture, and then running the audio through that. I did get a couple of encoding overloads the first couple of times I tried to record, but it seems to work just fine aside from that, and from strictly eyeballing it, I don't think the quality really suffers. Unless I can figure out how to fix the stuttering issue with just OBS, this'll likely be how I record direct game capture footage going forward for the time being. It's slightly annoying that I now have to have another window open (and, for the first time since 2023, game audio is also being output through my PC's speakers, which could pose issues for occasions like streaming while in a Discord call, hence why I tried to split the audio). I'd appreciate feedback on how this looks and sounds, and if anybody knows how I can avoid the stuttering issue without having to resort to capturing Amarec, please tell me, because I'm not totally sold on the idea of having to go through with this.