Upgrade Questions

[JFischer00]

1 minute ago, don_svetlio said:

Try for a neon purple PC? That might be unique

Anyway, i5 + 380 is a very solid option and a PSU such as the M12II EVO (for less cabbles and reliability) sounds like a plan. Good luck. Hope you win

Alright, I'll think about changing the colors to something different and thanks!

[JFischer00]

13 minutes ago, don_svetlio said:

Try for a neon purple PC? That might be unique

Anyway, i5 + 380 is a very solid option and a PSU such as the M12II EVO (for less cabbles and reliability) sounds like a plan. Good luck. Hope you win

What do you think of blue/black with the S340 in blue or maybe gray/silver/blue with the new Eclipse P400 in gray?

[D2ultima]

Erm, am I still needed? I was summoned.

[don_svetlio]

3 minutes ago, D2ultima said:

Erm, am I still needed? I was summoned.

Well, the OP probably still wants recommended settings for a R9 380 with OBS

31 minutes ago, JFischer00 said:

What do you think of blue/black with the S340 in blue or maybe gray/silver/blue with the new Eclipse P400 in gray?

Blue-Black is interesting.

[D2ultima]

1 minute ago, don_svetlio said:

Well, the OP probably still wants recommended settings for a R9 380 with OBS

With a R9 380 and an i5-anything he should be using VCE.

[don_svetlio]

1 minute ago, D2ultima said:

With a R9 380 and an i5-anything he should be using VCE.

Yup but he apparently had issues with his 7850 (though he IS running a G3258)

[D2ultima]

21 minutes ago, don_svetlio said:

Yup but he apparently had issues with his 7850 (though he IS running a G3258)

Actually, come to think of it, Quicksync may be the better option instead of VCE. I forgot about that for a second. He won't be using his iGPU (though it must be turned on in his BIOS) so it's fine to use. It'll heat up the CPU a bit more, so a decent cooler might be required.

[JFischer00]

19 hours ago, D2ultima said:

Erm, am I still needed? I was summoned.

Yeah, I would love OBS settings (AMD VCE or normal) for any combination of G3258, i5-4590, HD 7850, and R9 380. Basically, any settings help with Intel CPUs and AMD GPUs I can get would be much appreciated.

[D2ultima]

2 hours ago, JFischer00 said:

Yeah, I would love OBS settings (AMD VCE or normal) for any combination of G3258, i5-4590, HD 7850, and R9 380. Basically, any settings help with Intel CPUs and AMD GPUs I can get would be much appreciated.

There's not many settings to give. Quicksync is your best option for the i5/380 combo. The G3258 is almost never going to be capable of streaming well. Hardware encoders simply take care of the video encoding. The rest of OBS' CPU usage is not zero, and a dual core without hyperthreading is just not really cut out for it giving any sort of good scenario.

 

The best advice I can give is limiting the framerate of the games being played (60fps helps, 30fps if 60 is still too laggy, etc) for the Pentium, to save on GPU power.

[JFischer00]

14 minutes ago, D2ultima said:

There's not many settings to give. Quicksync is your best option for the i5/380 combo. The G3258 is almost never going to be capable of streaming well. Hardware encoders simply take care of the video encoding. The rest of OBS' CPU usage is not zero, and a dual core without hyperthreading is just not really cut out for it giving any sort of good scenario.

 

The best advice I can give is limiting the framerate of the games being played (60fps helps, 30fps if 60 is still too laggy, etc) for the Pentium, to save on GPU power.

What about CBR vs VBR and max bitrate? How do these affect performance and quality? Do you use custom parameters for the Quick Sync Encoder? This is what I love and hate about OBS: there's soooo much customization available, but at the same time there's nowhere to learn what each setting does. That's one reason I was looking at an Nvidia card: Shadowplay is simple to understand and easy to use.

[D2ultima]

1 hour ago, JFischer00 said:

What about CBR vs VBR and max bitrate? How do these affect performance and quality? Do you use custom parameters for the Quick Sync Encoder? This is what I love and hate about OBS: there's soooo much customization available, but at the same time there's nowhere to learn what each setting does. That's one reason I was looking at an Nvidia card: Shadowplay is simple to understand and easy to use.

• CBR is constant bitrate and VBR is variable bitrate. Maximum bitrate is the maximum allowed bitrate for the stream. Since every major streaming site guidelines state that CBR is required, you need not care about the others for the purpose of streaming.
• For the purpose of recording, there are guides out there that suggest setting max bitrate to 0 and buffer to 1000 and not using CBR, which allows as much bitrate as needed to be used for quality.
• I am incapable of using Quicksync, as the mobile chipset for SLI boards denies access to the iGPU on my machine, because fuck mobile users says intel.
• NVENC (shadowplay encoder) and AMD APP (essentially VCE) are mostly the same in terms of how to use. Quality isn't going to be changed very much in it no matter what settings you use outside of bitrate, just like with Quicksync and all hardware-based encoders.
• Hardware based encoders exist for cheap (performance-wise), fast (low compression, low quality), recording options, since CPU-based X264 and X265 and MJPEG recording is rather demanding for quality in general. Using faster CPU-based compressions (like the Ultrafast setting for x264) ends up requiring too much bitrate to look ok, and colour compression issues can occur even with high bitrates. In this respect, with high bitrate allowance, hardware encoders (which perform in general a LITTLE worse than "veryfast" but much better than "superfast" for x264) are the best choice. But since streaming doesn't do this, they're not recommended for quality for streaming.
• But your CPUs are not good enough to put the required compression on streams either; which is why 8-core AMD chips (with the proper know-how and overclock applied) and decently clocked i7 chips (I.E. no current stock-speed mobile i7, and no ULV i7) are much preferred for streaming in terms of acquiring quality... unless you're a person who just leaves the stream at default settings and sets bitrate alone, like so many people with high end PCs on twitch do, wasting their multi-thousand-dollar setups.
• If you stream with Shadowplay specifically, I will personally stab you through your stream. It's garbage. You need to be in fullscreen and alt-tabbing for any purpose throws up a big "pause" button on-screen and nobody can see or hear anything until you tab back in.
• There's places to learn, but sometimes you just need to ask. I do agree that there could be more documentation readily available for settings, though.

[JFischer00]

7 minutes ago, D2ultima said:

• CBR is constant bitrate and VBR is variable bitrate. Maximum bitrate is the maximum allowed bitrate for the stream. Since every major streaming site guidelines state that CBR is required, you need not care about the others for the purpose of streaming.
• For the purpose of recording, there are guides out there that suggest setting max bitrate to 0 and buffer to 1000 and not using CBR, which allows as much bitrate as needed to be used for quality.
• I am incapable of using Quicksync, as the mobile chipset for SLI boards denies access to the iGPU on my machine, because fuck mobile users says intel.
• NVENC (shadowplay encoder) and AMD APP (essentially VCE) are mostly the same in terms of how to use. Quality isn't going to be changed very much in it no matter what settings you use outside of bitrate, just like with Quicksync and all hardware-based encoders.
• Hardware based encoders exist for cheap (performance-wise), fast (low compression, low quality), recording options, since CPU-based X264 and X265 and MJPEG recording is rather demanding for quality in general. Using faster CPU-based compressions (like the Ultrafast setting for x264) ends up requiring too much bitrate to look ok, and colour compression issues can occur even with high bitrates. In this respect, with high bitrate allowance, hardware encoders (which perform in general a LITTLE worse than "veryfast" but much better than "superfast" for x264) are the best choice. But since streaming doesn't do this, they're not recommended for quality for streaming.
• But your CPUs are not good enough to put the required compression on streams either; which is why 8-core AMD chips (with the proper know-how and overclock applied) and decently clocked i7 chips (I.E. no current stock-speed mobile i7, and no ULV i7) are much preferred for streaming in terms of acquiring quality... unless you're a person who just leaves the stream at default settings and sets bitrate alone, like so many people with high end PCs on twitch do, wasting their multi-thousand-dollar setups.
• If you stream with Shadowplay specifically, I will personally stab you through your stream. It's garbage. You need to be in fullscreen and alt-tabbing for any purpose throws up a big "pause" button on-screen and nobody can see or hear anything until you tab back in.
• There's places to learn, but sometimes you just need to ask. I do agree that there could be more documentation readily available for settings, though.

Thank you so much! I didn't really want to use Shadowplay. I like OBS, but I've been trying forever to get the right balance of quality and performance and just haven't been able to get it. This should help tremendously.

[D2ultima]

15 hours ago, JFischer00 said:

Thank you so much! I didn't really want to use Shadowplay. I like OBS, but I've been trying forever to get the right balance of quality and performance and just haven't been able to get it. This should help tremendously.

Glad it was enough, and hope you understand enough now.