Question about pixelation while streaming

[afk47]

Hello everybody, i have some questions about pixelation while streaming certain games,if i understand correctly the 2 major factors that can cause pixelation are bitrate and cpu preset,i have been trying to stream 2 games that both contain high movement and alot of foliage(PUBG and Dayz). Now i have tried everything to decrease the amount of pixelation while streaming from x264 and nvenc too trying different presets and changing resolution, i myself stream with streamlabs obs and i found out that if i keep my output settings to simple i have the best quality while streaming but still i get pixelation. I will link a video of a test i did before,My main question for after you watch the video is will the quality of my stream increase if i upgrade my cpu on the streaming pc currently thinking of getting a i7900k Specs:Streaming pc: i5 8400,gtx1050ti,8gbRam,Elgato HD60S Settings StreamlabsOBS: X264, Output mode Simple Bitrate:7000 Downscaled to 900p60 PS:whenever i run in the grass you can see how it starts pixelating

Video Link https://www.twitch.tv/videos/368395791

[KarathKasun]

Nvenc gives blurry/muddy results regardless, just what it is.

 

x264 needs bandwidth, at least 10mbit/s upstream.  The CPU preset will not matter if your upstream is still limited.  You will need to reduce FPS (30) or resolution (720p) if you are already maxing out your connection.

[afk47]

2 minutes ago, KarathKasun said:

Nvenc gives blurry/muddy results regardless, just what it is.

 

x264 needs bandwidth, at least 10mbit/s upstream.  The CPU preset will not matter if your upstream is still limited.  You will need to reduce FPS (30) or resolution (720p) if you are already maxing out your connection.

Average download speed 192,2 Mbps

              Upload speed 19,1 Mbps

[KarathKasun]

4 minutes ago, afk47 said:

Average download speed 192,2 Mbps

              Upload speed 19,1 Mbps

Push up to 10mbit (10000), see if that helps.

[afk47]

2 minutes ago, KarathKasun said:

Push up to 10mbit (10000), see if that helps.

i tried but at 8000 it says that the "twitch machine got unplugged" and i just cant load the video 

[KarathKasun]

Bleh, push to a higher quality CPU preset if you can then.  More CPU encoding power needed = better image with lower bitrate.

[afk47]

3 minutes ago, KarathKasun said:

Bleh, push to a higher quality CPU preset if you can then.  More CPU encoding power needed = better image with lower bitrate.

So do you think that if i upgrade my cpu i can get better quality because im pretty sure im maxed out on cpu preset 

[KarathKasun]

9 minutes ago, afk47 said:

So do you think that if i upgrade my cpu i can get better quality because im pretty sure im maxed out on cpu preset 

What CPU preset are you using?

[afk47]

9 minutes ago, KarathKasun said:

What CPU preset are you using?

Current cpu preset is Faster whenever i try to go to fast stream starts lagging 

[KarathKasun]

Just now, afk47 said:

Current cpu preset is Faster whenever i try to go to fast stream starts lagging 

You need more CPU then.  "fast" side of the presets prioritize low CPU load over high quality.

[afk47]

Just now, KarathKasun said:

You need more CPU then.  "fast" side of the presets prioritize low CPU load over high quality.

Thank you very much for giving me some time today i will probably upgrade my cpu on the streaming pc to see if i can go lower in the presets

[KarathKasun]

5 minutes ago, afk47 said:

Thank you very much for giving me some time today i will probably upgrade my cpu on the streaming pc to see if i can go lower in the presets

High core count will pretty much get you up to the "slowest" setting.  I am not sure where the "sweet spot" is, but I would aim for 10-12 cores.  AMD is usually a better buy in this area.

[mariushm]

nvEnc and other Hardware encoder will always have issues with small details, because they're tuned for speed and not quality preservation.

 

x264 will give better results.

 

Some comments though.

 

Resizing / Scaling 1080p content to 900p is not such a great idea, as you'd introduce rounding errors which lowers quality and makes x264 need more bits to compress image. Ideally, you'd want to resize exactly by half, so 1920x1080 converted down to 960x540, or not resize at all, by playing and capturing at 1280x720 or 1366x768 or 1600x900 or 1600x1000 (16:10).

Your video card driver may have scaling options where regardless of what resolution game uses, it can set another resolution to the monitor and scale the image or center it in the middle of the screen. So for example, you could play at 1600x900 or 1600x1000 and the video card would output 1080p but the game image would be centered in the middle of the screen.... so you can capture 1080p content with the capture card and you simply crop the actual game image at encoding

 

You have custom x264 options for that, you can say there something like :

 

--video-filter crop:160,90,1600,900

 

if you capture 1920x1080 but you only want 1600x900 centered in the middle of the view (top corner would be 160 pixels from left, 90 pixels from top) 

 

Cropping is also basically free, while scaling/resizing uses cpu or gpu to be done.

 

You could also play with the grain tuning , add --tune grain in those custom x264 parameters. It's supposed to reduce the blurring and preserve more grain on film, but that can be also useful on grass... though you may not have enough bitrate to make any meaningful difference.

For pixel art games using --tune animation may help

 

Set the keyframe interval to 2 seconds ... by default it may be set to 1s, fewer keyframes leaves more bits for the rest of the frames, improving quality.

 

Oh yeah, and there's also stuff like NDI where you can take the raw image from your PC and stream it over the network to another PC which then can use the whole cpu just for encoding.

This way your pc can use the cpu exclusively for game, and the other pc can encode, so you can raise the quality settings to preserve more quality.