Should I use hardware encoding for streaming?

[Ren Heika]

So I have taken up streaming here recently and have been using software encoding until yesterday, my CPU usually is underutilized when playing a game but I ended up playing Subnautica in VR yesterday and it used a lot of CPU power, from what I understand my RX 580 has a dedicated hardware encoder and I tried AMD encoding out on OBS and it works pretty well, looks like there is a bit of degradation in quality but not much. I'm just curious if there is any reason I should stay with software encoding or if hardware encoding would work fine.

[TrueMegaManiac]

Depends on what you are after. If you want minimal performance impact, keep using the hardware encoder, if however you want higher quality stream output and the performance impact doesn't bother you too much(in the case of VR, it isn't stuttering and inducing motion sickness) then software would do better. High CPU usage isn't a bad thing, stutter from a maxed out CPU is what you want to avoid.

Edited February 1, 2018 by TrueMegaManiac
Fixed a wording mistake

[Ren Heika]

1 minute ago, TrueMegaManiac said:

Depends on what you are after. If you want minimal performance impact, keep using the hardware encoder, if however you want higher quality stream output and the performance impact doesn't bother you too much(in the case of VR, it isn't stuttering and inducing motion sickness) then software would do better. High CPU isn't a bad thing, stutter from a maxed out CPU is what you want to avoid.

Yeah I was getting that when I streamed the other day, do you think it may be a good idea to switch between encoders depending on what I'm streaming?

[TrueMegaManiac]

1 minute ago, Renton577 said:

Yeah I was getting that when I streamed the other day, do you think it may be a good idea to switch between encoders depending on what I'm streaming?

Yeah that would work pretty well. You can also compensate the quality difference on hardware by upping the bitrate though that's more bandwidth and that can lead to issues if you run into your upload speed max.

[Ren Heika]

1 minute ago, TrueMegaManiac said:

Yeah that would work pretty well. You can also compensate the quality difference on hardware by upping the bitrate though that's more bandwidth and that can lead to issues if you run into your upload speed max.

Yeah that might be an issue, I am already uploading 4.9Mbps but Twitch recommends between 3 to 6, I have about 12Mbps of upload bandwidth so do you think switching over to the max recommended of 6Mbps would be okay for hardware encoding?

[TrueMegaManiac]

1 minute ago, Renton577 said:

Yeah that might be an issue, I am already uploading 4.9Mbps but Twitch recommends between 3 to 6, I have about 12Mbps of upload bandwidth so do you think switching over to the max recommended of 6Mbps would be okay for hardware encoding?

Twitch doesn't like it when you go over 6. Try 6Mbps or just under and see how it goes. 12 is a pretty good upload speed though so that's very comfortable headroom

[Ren Heika]

1 minute ago, TrueMegaManiac said:

Twitch doesn't like it when you go over 6. Try 6Mbps or just under and see how it goes. 12 is a pretty good upload speed though so that's very comfortable headroom

Thank you for your help on this, I will give that a try and see how it looks, maybe I'll try a recording first just to see how the quality looks.