Stream Settings

[awpshots]

Hi all, I stream Overwatch (almost exclusively) and have never put a lot of thought into my obs settings but wanted opinions on them and if they could be any better optimized for my specs.

 

-Specs:
10700k (with 280mm AIO so with AI overclock it basically sits at 5.1ghz 24/7)
32gb 2666mhz
Strix 2080 Ti (voltage power temp limits maxed, +1000mhz memory OC, base GPU clocks because my card gets really unstable if i touch that)

-Overwatch settings:
Fullscreen 1440p144hz, Vsync on, reduce buffering on
Low preset

-OBS settings:
1080p60 (also thinking about switching to 720p120, thoughts? a few streamer friends of mine use this for overwatch)

New NVENC, max quality

6k bitrate
psycho visual tuning on

[Skiiwee29]

Crank your in-game settings to Max.. your GPU is powerful enough easily to give you fill 144FPS with Vsync on 24/7. No use in sacrificing visual quality for nothing.. all its going to do is make your GPU run a smidgen hotter. Your OBS settings are 100% fine for streaming. Only need to worry if you're getting dropped frames. 

[awpshots]

2 minutes ago, Skiiwee29 said:

Crank your in-game settings to Max.. your GPU is powerful enough easily to give you fill 144FPS with Vsync on 24/7. No use in sacrificing visual quality for nothing.. all its going to do is make your GPU run a smidgen hotter. Your OBS settings are 100% fine for streaming. Only need to worry if you're getting dropped frames. 

I have them on low specifically because its less distracting. Other high ranked players and streamers do this as well. In addition to that, there are specific things that happen (i.e. mei's blizzard which covers your screen in particle effects and would drop my fps significantly when i ran unlimited fps, down to below 144)

Also I know they're fine for streaming, but I was thinking of a possibility that having a 16 thread CPU might provide a better x264 stream quality than nvenc could provide

[Skiiwee29]

2 minutes ago, awpshots said:

I have them on low specifically because its less distracting. Other high ranked players and streamers do this as well. In addition to that, there are specific things that happen (i.e. mei's blizzard which covers your screen in particle effects and would drop my fps significantly when i ran unlimited fps, down to below 144)

Also I know they're fine for streaming, but I was thinking of a possibility that having a 16 thread CPU might provide a better x264 stream quality than nvenc could provide

There is literally no perceivable difference between x264 and new NVENC. You would actually lose performance because of the CPU hit. With New NVENC, you see zero performance loss and it will be exactly as if you were playing while not streaming. 

[awpshots]

1 minute ago, Skiiwee29 said:

There is literally no perceivable difference between x264 and new NVENC. You would actually lose performance because of the CPU hit. With New NVENC, you see zero performance loss and it will be exactly as if you were playing while not streaming. 

Okay well your last point is just untrue sorry, no matter what game I play I usually see a 20% performance hit using nvenc to stream. For example, with all max settings on Rust, I go from 100-120fps off stream to 80-100 on stream. 

[Mark Kaine]

I think you're way too concerned about these settings, mainly because at 6000 Bitrate image quality will be terrible regardless of other settings, due to compression and whatnot. 

 

9 hours ago, awpshots said:

Okay well your last point is just untrue sorry, no matter what game I play I usually see a 20% performance hit using nvenc to stream. For example, with all max settings on Rust, I go from 100-120fps off stream to 80-100 on stream. 

 I use NVENC / shadow play and the performance impact is about 1-2 fps at 60 fps and I usually record at 25k Bitrate, streaming I just do the max yt allows (forgot, 8k maybe?) but quality is always awful while streaming obviously since yt only gives big streamers high quality streams, no names must be satisfied with what looks like a 480p badly upscaled to "720p" stream.

 

9 hours ago, awpshots said:

have them on low specifically because its less distracting. Other high ranked players and streamers do this as well. In addition to that, there are specific things that happen (i.e. mei's blizzard which covers your screen in particle effects and would drop my fps significantly

What a weird, unoptimized game haha, though I suppose that's normal for "competitive" games, can't have shiny graphics distracting you too much.

[LogicalDrm]

-> Moved to Programs, Apps and Websites

***

 

So the big thing (still) is whether you stream to Twitch or to YT/FB. And whether you are partner or whatever the Twitch term for higher tier streamers is. As that will determine if your channel has some or none scaling options. What this means is that your viewers either need to have 6mbps download speed at minimum to match your upload, or have very buffery experience. If you get scaling options (if you stream at the same time with major streamers or events this is nope), then viewers can select something else than source to still view channel.

 

AFAIK youtube is bit better with these, both allowing higher max bitrate at 10k, and having scaling available to all. (Internet says they don't have scaling for 4k streams)

[Mark Kaine]

7 hours ago, LogicalDrm said:

AFAIK youtube is bit better with these, both allowing higher max bitrate at 10k, and having scaling available to all.

Yeah, it goes pretty high and also depends on resolutions and fps, but the streams I've been doing at 720p really look like they're compressed really badly, any idea if they give better compression rates if you pay for red (premium) or whatever it's called nowadays? 

 

Thing is I don't really want to become a big streamer, I just want to use this as an archive of sorts, and well, quality isn't great, the videos I have stored locally look so much better and I think it's partly due to bad compression on yt side. 

[LogicalDrm]

1 hour ago, Mark Kaine said:

Yeah, it goes pretty high and also depends on resolutions and fps, but the streams I've been doing at 720p really look like they're compressed really badly, any idea if they give better compression rates if you pay for red (premium) or whatever it's called nowadays?

I don't know whether Red/Music does anything on creator side of things. And since my laptop (on which I stream) doesn't allow me to go over 2700kbps, I don't know whether there even is compression or not. Its looks like it would in Twitch using same bitrate.