four cores seems to be enough to stream

[ZenMonkey]

When Ryzen first launched, one of the draws was an appeal to people who stream their gameplay. I have a 4th gen i5 and I game on a 1080p/144Hz monitor, and I'm able to stream to Twitch using the NVidia Geforce Experience software on Twitch's highest preset (1080p/60fps with 9Mbps bitrate) with Overwatch and Witcher 3 with only a slight decrease to my system's performance, which I don't even notice. As far as I can tell, there is no need for streamers to upgrade their older 4-core chips.

[WereCatf]

Geforce Experience uses the hardware-encoder called NVENC built-in on NVIDIA GPUs, it doesn't use CPU to do the encoding and that's why you're not seeing much of a difference in performance.

[Ryzen-9]

The games that you listed are more gpu intensive then cpu so your cpu isn't really doing that much. An advantage to having more cores is that you could stream and record at the same time if you want to post the video or make a stream highlights video. If you are using an Elgato to record then it wont really be using your cpu but most youtubers record with a program.

[SeanAngelo]

10 minutes ago, ZenMonkey said:

When Ryzen first launched, one of the draws was an appeal to people who stream their gameplay. I have a 4th gen i5 and I game on a 1080p/144Hz monitor, and I'm able to stream to Twitch using the NVidia Geforce Experience software on Twitch's highest preset (1080p/60fps with 9Mbps bitrate) with Overwatch and Witcher 3 with only a slight decrease to my system's performance, which I don't even notice. As far as I can tell, there is no need for streamers to upgrade their older 4-core chips.

that's because the gpu is doing all the encoding.... not the cpu.

 

go and try OBS and watch it be TOTALLY different. you'll want a new cpu after trying it, lol.

[ZenMonkey]

16 hours ago, №☢ said:

The games that you listed are more gpu intensive then cpu so your cpu isn't really doing that much. An advantage to having more cores is that you could stream and record at the same time if you want to post the video or make a stream highlights video. If you are using an Elgato to record then it wont really be using your cpu but most youtubers record with a program.

 

NVidia's software specifically prevents me from recording and streaming simultaneously. I need to download the stream video from my Twitch archive if I want to edit it and/or upload it elsewhere.

[ZenMonkey]

16 hours ago, SeanAngelo said:

that's because the gpu is doing all the encoding.... not the cpu.

 

go and try OBS and watch it be TOTALLY different. you'll want a new cpu after trying it, lol.

 

Why would I do that?

[ZenMonkey]

16 hours ago, WereCatf said:

Geforce Experience uses the hardware-encoder called NVENC built-in on NVIDIA GPUs, it doesn't use CPU to do the encoding and that's why you're not seeing much of a difference in performance.

 

Well, that's cool. So if I upgrade my monitor and start to run 1440p instead of 1080p, I would see a more drastic difference as the new settings would tax my GPU more? Good to know! Thanks for the info.

[WereCatf]

36 minutes ago, ZenMonkey said:

 

Well, that's cool. So if I upgrade my monitor and start to run 1440p instead of 1080p, I would see a more drastic difference as the new settings would tax my GPU more? Good to know! Thanks for the info.

Uh, no. NVENC is a separate part of the chip, it has nothing to do with the rendering-part, so increasing resolution should have literally zero effect.

[ZenMonkey]

28 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

Uh, no. NVENC is a separate part of the chip, it has nothing to do with the rendering-part, so increasing resolution should have literally zero effect.

 

Oh, that's awesome. Is there any reason for someone using an NVidia card to not use Geforce Experience to stream?

[WereCatf]

Just now, ZenMonkey said:

 

Oh, that's awesome. Is there any reason for someone using an NVidia card to not use Geforce Experience to stream?

There are a couple ones, but how much they matter is a matter of personal taste, like e.g. I, personally, do not even install Geforce Experience (I use OBS Studio, which also supports NVENC these days) because of how much telemetry-data it's constantly sending to NVIDIA about everything running on your system. Another thing is that you can get better quality when using software-encoding.

 

That said, if you find the image-quality of your streams/recordings acceptable, then there isn't really much of a reason to spend any more time on thinking about it. The rare, few times I stream, I stream at 1080p 60FPS and 10Mbps and I am totally, perfectly happy with the quality and the little improvement I'd get from using CPU-encoding isn't worth the performance-drop and/or hardware-investment required, in my opinion. So, this begs the question: are you happy with the quality? If yes, then truck on.