What is the point of a streaming PC?

[Downkey]

Ok so I have never understood the point of a "streaming PC." Why does it exist? How does it work? Won't one be enough?

Sorry if I seem like an idiot, I got really into Pc-Building and tech in the summer, so i'm still quite new too all of this

[Nate.]

I really don't know, i think it's basically a gaming PC but maybe with more RGB.

 

 

(just a joke, i have no idea someone else answer please lol)

[Master Disaster]

No such thing as a dumb question, only a dumb answer.

 

Streamers usually stream games and games can be taxing on a system (unless its really powerful), streaming is taxing on a CPU since its encoding the stream on the fly. What happens is you can run the game fine but as soon as you try to stream it you get frame drops because the system is now trying to do 2 things at the same time.

 

Having one PC playing the game and a second doing the encoding fixes this issue.

[PlayStation 2]

Truthfully, the point of a streaming PC comes down to how much encoding power one needs. Sometimes it can be more efficient to have one rig doing the gameplay and the other doing the muscle work of video encoding. It doesn't come cheap, especially if you want high quality and/or high resolution footage.

For most of this forum's userbase needs, though, a streaming PC is absolutely redundant. It's less of a useful tool and more of a liability when you don't have a need for a dedicated video encoding machine.

[jaslion]

5 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

No such thing as a dumb question, only a dumb answer.

 

Streamers usually stream games and games can be taxing on a system (unless its really powerful), streaming is taxing on a CPU since its encoding the stream on the fly. What happens is you can run the game fine but as soon as you try to stream it you get frame drops because the system is now trying to do 2 things at the same time.

 

Having one PC playing the game and a second doing the encoding fixes this issue.

It is much less needed if at all nowadays since we now have 16 core consumer cpu's or very good gpu encode so basically the streaming pc is not needed anymore when building a new system as you can just add the budget of the streaming rig to the main one and get everything in one system without compromises.

[Downkey]

1 minute ago, jaslion said:

It is much less needed if at all nowadays since we now have 16 core consumer cpu's or very good gpu encode so basically the streaming pc is not needed anymore when building a new system as you can just add the budget of the streaming rig to the main one and get everything in one system without compromises.

Thats what I was thinking orignally, im suprised most people dont use nvenc?

[jaslion]

Just now, Downkey said:

Thats what I was thinking orignally, im suprised most people dont use nvenc?

Cpu encode is still higher quality. That and some people get into streaming with rigs that aren't able to handle it fully on their own but don't have the budget to get a full fledged upgrade.

[FavoringWinter]

Pc One (Gaming PC): plays all of the games, none of the encoding
Pc Two (Stream PC): Encodes the stream, and they a lot of times have things like OBS and their chat up.
It is mainly for better fps and lower input lag in game, and higher quality streams

[PT22YT]

17 minutes ago, Downkey said:

Ok so I have never understood the point of a "streaming PC." Why does it exist? How does it work? Won't one be enough?

Sorry if I seem like an idiot, I got really into Pc-Building and tech in the summer, so i'm still quite new too all of this

Simple and short answer, you can stream in 1080p 60fps (if you have a capture card) with ought any input delay or FPS drops on your gaming pc. You can play pretty much like your not streaming (the same FPS and input delay) but stream w high quality 

[akio123008]

Well another reason one may want a streaming PC, is to create more redundancy, not just processing power. 

 

If you have a separate PC that handles all the video encoding and possibly mixing etc, crashes and problems on the system running the game won't ruin the stream. It also allows for easy control of the stream, no alt-tabbing or windowed mode nonsense are required.

 

Having a separate computer handle the stream also allows someone else to control the stream while you focus purely on the gameplay, something more professional streamers might appreciate.

 

[solarflare]

the above post has some good points. 

 

if your streaming into a pc with media capture your not tying up resources for that task. 

you can also be recording all your footage to a local storage and if you like a clean gaming rig perhaps you dont want a bunch of standard drives lining it . 

It allows also for higher grade encoding without taxing your setup. 

[light-v]

In my experience keeping loads separate reduces the risk of the game crashing especially buggy ones. Some games just love to crash if you look at them the wrong way so getting a streaming PC can alleviate that to some extent 

[LogicalDrm]

For streamers it can also give benefits of being their main storage for footage. Looking at Jacksepticeye's setup video, he says that streamers have started use more of two PC setup. Though I would still wage a guess that only the biggest ones do it. Its expensive, takes effort and knowledge to setup and run after all, or to have someone to run it for you. Not something most streamers can really afford (at least if they are truthful with their donation pleas).

[YoMz]

16 hours ago, Downkey said:

Ok so I have never understood the point of a "streaming PC." Why does it exist? How does it work? Won't one be enough?

Sorry if I seem like an idiot, I got really into Pc-Building and tech in the summer, so i'm still quite new too all of this

there's a few things I can think of and I will list them...

 

- for convenience... especially for the experienced streamers, it is very common to do test streams on a secondary channel to test for video and audio quality, this is very hard to test if you are checking the stream on the same PC that you are playing on...

 

- for better overall game performance... since a lot of games are very taxing (especially when streaming games that focus on visuals) it's almost always better to have a dedicated streaming PC for this... you can apply the same logic when going to studios, and you wonder (why all of this equipment for recording?) when doing professional work, it's always good practice to have dedicated tools for specific tasks that perform exceptionally than have a tool that does a lot of different tasks in mediocrity...

 

- streamers that have mods in-house or tournaments will have a dedicated streaming PC while mods and operators while retroactively change the overlays, ads, camera angles, etc... when there is more than one person working on the stream, it's always better to have a dedicated streaming pc for this, so you don't get in the way of the actual person playing/streaming...

 

there should be more reasons... but these are the things I can think of... like I said earlier, just as in any industry, it's always good to have dedicated tools for the specific tasks you want to achieve to get the most out of whatever you are doing... a swiss army knife is nice to have because of the variety of tools it has, but you can't exactly use it for professional kitchen work (and even then you would still end up using a variety of different knives for specific tasks)

[mariushm]

 

For performance reasons. 

 

You're not just compressing the game, you're also capturing the camera recording you, and some streamers also use various plugins to show donations on the stream, messages, text to speech. 

 

You can use nvEnc to hardware encode the video, but that will put a very small performance hit on the video card, and the varying frame rate can cause some issues.

 

You could use a quality hdmi/displayport capture card that can grab lossless 60 frames per second and pass through everything to monitor, so now you have an archival copy of your stream (around 22 GB per minute for 1080p 60 fps if completely uncompressed rgb24, around 10-16 GB if YV12 color format is used - then you can use near lossless h264 encoding to bring it down to around 100-200 mbps bitrate ) and at the same time, you can use software encoding for as high quality as possible within the bitrate you can use.

 

 

 

 

[Ar558a]

Since nvenc there is little point really, before that existed it was hard for most PC's to run a game and encode the stream without sufferring performance issues. Now with nvenc the hit is approx 5% so I wouldn't recommend getting one unless you have other reasons 

[Kisai]

On 2/2/2021 at 8:12 AM, Downkey said:

Ok so I have never understood the point of a "streaming PC." Why does it exist? How does it work? Won't one be enough?

Sorry if I seem like an idiot, I got really into Pc-Building and tech in the summer, so i'm still quite new too all of this

 

In a nutshell, a streaming PC is any PC that is rigged only with, or only used primarily to live-stream from. So you would otherwise leave it alone so that you don't have to reconfigure things over and over again when you switch from gaming to streaming.

 

For the most part, what you need is one or two GPU's in the system that are capable of encoding multiple h.264 streams, or able to do it entirely with ffmpeg (x264) because the most computationally expensive part of streaming is the compositing in real time. So a 32-core CPU is more advantageous than say a RTX 3090. Yet, it's a diminishing returns thing. Like if you're doing 20 layers of animation over/under a game and a webcam input, plus audio mixing, chances are the CPU will be taxed well before it gets to the GPU. 

 

This is of course because many animation things used by OBS and Streamlabs are actually done using a chromium webview and not a dedicated capture surface. This results in multiple passes through the GPU to decode, render, rescale and encode it. This is all stuff that is more efficient to do on the CPU rather than on the CPU for latency reasons. However it's a diminishing returns issue as well. 

 

Like you will never know how much CPU or GPU power you need on the streaming device unless you purposely run it inefficiently in a way you are unlikely to ever use in production.

 

 

[RoseLuck462]

I prefer it to maximize performance for my gaming PC.

[thrasher_565]

On 2/2/2021 at 8:16 AM, Master Disaster said:

No such thing as a dumb question, only a dumb answer.

 

Streamers usually stream games and games can be taxing on a system (unless its really powerful), streaming is taxing on a CPU since its encoding the stream on the fly. What happens is you can run the game fine but as soon as you try to stream it you get frame drops because the system is now trying to do 2 things at the same time.

 

Having one PC playing the game and a second doing the encoding fixes this issue.

there are other point too add thow 1 pc for gaming only the other for videos chat recording. other things are if your gaming pc gos down your steam is still up. do you really need it probably not but if you can afford it why not. and if they do upgrade there gaming pc the old pc gets used as the streaming pc anyway.

 

starting out get your name out there and worry about upgrades later is the point.

Edited February 6, 2021 by thrasher_565