CPUs for gaming while recording/streaming

[CubeTheThird]

While (to my knowledge) it has generally been stated in LTT reviews that modern gaming benefits from having 4 CPU cores, and that any more isn't necessary, I'm wondering how well this holds up for gaming while recording and/or streaming. I would expect that, depending on the software being used, the video encoding is mostly being handled by the CPU, and thus would benefit from having extra cores or threads. What I would like to know is what factors affect CPU usage in this case, and to what degree. Things such as gaming resolution (e.g. 1080 vs 4K), recording/streaming software, and paired GPU are examples of such. While I'm planning for an eventual desktop PC build, I've currently dabbled a bit in game recording on my Laptop, and am curious the difference using desktop components has, as opposed to mobile ones.

[Matu20]

The higher the resolution, the less work resides on the CPU. 

[Ryoku]

5 minutes ago, CubeTheThird said:

While (to my knowledge) it has generally been stated in LTT reviews that modern gaming benefits from having 4 CPU cores, and that any more isn't necessary, I'm wondering how well this holds up for gaming while recording and/or streaming. I would expect that, depending on the software being used, the video encoding is mostly being handled by the CPU, and thus would benefit from having extra cores or threads. What I would like to know is what factors affect CPU usage in this case, and to what degree. Things such as gaming resolution (e.g. 1080 vs 4K), recording/streaming software, and paired GPU are examples of such. While I'm planning for an eventual desktop PC build, I've currently dabbled a bit in game recording on my Laptop, and am curious the difference using desktop components has, as opposed to mobile ones.

Depending on the software used recording/streaming while playing can put an extreme strain on your cpu.  Some software like OBS can use the shadowplay encoder on nvidia gpus to take over the majority of the encoding relieving a lot of the strain.  But even then have one of the extreme edition cpus with 6+ cores would help,  to be on the safe side if you want the best quality I would use atleast an I7 4 core (maybe when zen comes out they could handle it as well).

[CubeTheThird]

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OBS can use the shadowplay encoder on nvidia gpus

I wasn't aware that was a thing, so that's good to know. Sadly Shadowplay is not yet properly supported on Linux, but perhaps some day.

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to be on the safe side if you want the best quality I would use atleast an I7 4 core

This is more or less what I was thinking, since you do get the benefit of hyperthreading there.

 

I am very curious what Zen will bring, though I've generally been more a fan of Intel up until this point.

[Crossbred]

In general laptops have at most four cores, which most games will utilize all of. Desktops can have six or eight cores, which means you can run more programs beside the game that will not affect the performance of the game.

Hyperthreading cannot make up for fewer actual cores, but can most likely help in your situation.

[CubeTheThird]

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Hyperthreading cannot make up for fewer actual cores, but can most likely help in your situation.

Yes this is true, as hyperthreading can be beneficial depending on the workload. My thought on this is that, since many games are more GPU than CPU bound, there would be sufficient head room to handle video encoding on separate threads. This is however something one would need to test to confirm to be true.