The demands of Twitch/OBS on the CPU

[Emceeschw3pp3]

I was wondering how many cores/threads are need for a smooth stream and gaming experience. I know that games don't often use more than one or two cores/threads. I was wondering how many more cores/threads would be needed to stream to twitch with OBS, if any.

[Guest]

Depends on the codec; any new Intel CPU supports QuickSync, which uses the iGPU to encode, freeing up the main CPU for games

 

If you have an Nvidia card, you can use the hardware h.264 codec, which means a very low system impact (and no CPU impact)

 

If you use the default h.264 encoder, it takes a chunk, but certainly not enough to ruin gaming, depending on your hardware.

 

What's your CPU?

[Vendetta]

I stream fine with my i5 3570k, granted it is overclocked to 4.6Ghz, I will say that Adobe is a piece of shit that crashes constantly and takes up WAY to much resources. So I can't have an active flash player running in the background or else I'll get stuttering from maxing cpu.

[Emceeschw3pp3]

What's your CPU?

I got the Pentium Anniversary Edition OC'ed to 4.2ghz

[Guest]

I got the Pentium Anniversary Edition OC'ed to 4.2ghz

Should be alright, try QuickSync if possible.

[TheFalseHuman]

Depends on the codec; any new Intel CPU supports QuickSync, which uses the iGPU to encode, freeing up the main CPU for games

 

If you have an Nvidia card, you can use the hardware h.264 codec, which means a very low system impact (and no CPU impact)

 

If you use the default h.264 encoder, it takes a chunk, but certainly not enough to ruin gaming, depending on your hardware.

 

What's your CPU?

 

Since AMD cards also have a similar software with Nvidia's ShadowPlay, doesn't that mean AMD cards also have H.264 encoders on them and can be used with OBS?

 

I got the Pentium Anniversary Edition OC'ed to 4.2ghz

 

You're streaming + gaming on a dual core CPU?

 

Have you already streamed + game with that CPU? If so, how is the experience? What games are you streaming?

[Faa]

Since AMD cards also have a similar software with Nvidia's ShadowPlay, doesn't that mean AMD cards also have H.264 encoders on them and can be used with OBS?

AMD Raptor thing? That doesn't run of the hardware encoder on the GPU, (you can monitor this in GPU-z called VID usage). Shadowplay however does. AMD GPU's have a hardware encoder but there's no streaming software atm that uses it, OBS will soon add it I guess, they have to.

[Guest]

Since AMD cards also have a similar software with Nvidia's ShadowPlay, doesn't that mean AMD cards also have H.264 encoders on them and can be used with OBS?

No. Nvidia's Kepler GPUs (and up) have a dedicated h.264 encoder built into the graphics pipeline, so it encodes as a natural part of rendering and sending out the frame. As far as I know, any encoding AMD cards do aren't hardware-accelerated.

[Emceeschw3pp3]

 

You're streaming + gaming on a dual core CPU?

 

This reaction is the cause of this thread. The big question is how much of a benefit will something like an i3 or an AMD 4 core and up over the Pentium Anniversery be when running a game and streaming software? 

[TheFalseHuman]

This reaction is the cause of this thread. The big question is how much of a benefit will something like an i3 or an AMD 4 core and up over the Pentium Anniversery be when running a game and streaming software? 

Depending on the overclock (or silicon lottery), in not so demanding games, an i3 should perform about or maybe even a little less than G3258. However, if you're also streaming, get the CPU with the most amount of cores/threads.

 

I don't stream that much, so I don't know the exact details of the benefits of 2 cores/threads vs 3 (?) cores/threads vs 4 and so on. But, I have tried to stream once with an Intel dual core 2.4GHz, a CPU released in like 2010 I believe, and it was not a great experience. Even just having OBS opened and nothing else, there is a very noticeable decrease in performance. The dual core is just 2 cores/2 threads. Dunno, someone with more streaming experience comment on this?

[D2ultima]

This reaction is the cause of this thread. The big question is how much of a benefit will something like an i3 or an AMD 4 core and up over the Pentium Anniversery be when running a game and streaming software? 

An i3 clocked lower than 3.5GHz should probably not be as good as the 4.2GHz pentium G... but both are very bad for streaming PC games. Quicksync and NVENC are both exceedingly fast; similar to using maybe "superfast" preset in x264. It's not something useful for games that are harder to stream than say... PSX games or League of Legends, etc. But games like that are so easy to run anyway, that using x264 would probably be better.

 

Basically, quicksync is only useful for a game that REQUIRES lots of CPU power in which x264 encoding is too much of a detriment.

 

Personally, I wouldn't suggest it unless you're doing console streaming. For console streaming you'd probably be able to do "faster" for a nice benefit over "veryfast" and a decent bitrate/resolution, but it's more like scraping the bottom of the barrel. An i5 would do better, but an i7 is the best you will find, because hyperthreading is utilized in x264 and it is a HUGE improvement over non-HT-enabled CPUs.