Streaming with Ryzen 5 1600X

Lilthrasher · December 29, 2017

If I had a Ryzen 1600X for example with 6 cores 12 threads (Which I am thinking about buying), would I be able to use 4 threads for encoding and 4 threads for gaming and have 4 threads left over, or would I only be able to use 2 cores for encoding and 4 cores for gaming, and not have anything left over.

Princess Luna · December 29, 2017

You can give thread affinity to each software and potentially do what you said however I have always felt more beneficial just let windows scheduler do it automatically on mainstream CPUs though.

If you can afford up to the ryzen 5 1600x you probably can the ryzen 7 1700 the price gap ain't that big and then you'd have perfectly streaming capacity regardless... feels worth it in my particularly opinion, the 65w tdp and included stock cooler for free will make up since with the 1600x you'll have to afford a cooler too.

Second_Fry · December 29, 2017

Doubling on 1700 suggestion as you can try to overclock it to 1700x at least.

There are lots of ways to stream tho and they also depend on the fact are you Twitch Affiliate/Partner or not.

If you are not Twitch Affiliate/Partner, then max bandwidth will float around 2500 kbit/s (after that viewers start get buffering, to check if that is happening just watch your own stream for 5-10 minutes) so you won't be able to use hardware encoders (Intel QSV, AMD AMF, Nvidia NVENC) as results will be "blocky".

If you are one, then hardware encoding should be your main way to stream as it doesn't cost you much resources and gets job done (affiliates/partners get up to 6000 kbit/s).

On YouTube side of things you can stream 6000 kbit/s and probably higher from the start. Until you've got partnership you'd better to stream to multiple platforms at once – either with multiple OBS instances or with restreaming services.

All in all, I don't think you should restrict streaming software core/thread usage as encoding is not consistent workload. On chill moments you would get 5% CPU usage, on extreme rain of colorful particles up to 70% (on my i7 3770k, while streaming 720p60 @ 6000 kbit/s).