How many cores do you need for streaming?

[ZihanYu]

Hi people! I want to start live steaming on twitch and my laptops 3ghz 4core is not doing great. And sense I am planning on a new pc, I would wanted to do some overwatch steaming too. What cpu should I use with a 1070?

[SpiralTTGL]

for streaming I would highly recommend ryzen even first generation would do the job

ryzen 1800x or 2700x

 

with streaming and gaming more cores the better this also won't bottleneck a 1070 far from it

[Enderman]

If you stream using nvenc or quicksync then your CPU cores don't really matter.

[minibois]

it depends

 

2700X and 8700K would both be great choices for streaming as they both have quite a few thread (16 and 12 respectively) which streaming programs (I can only speak for OBS) love to use. But depending on kind of quality you want to stream at.. Or what thing you want to stream (intensive game? digital drawing program? etc.) can impact what you really not.

 

For example, with some fine tuning and such I am able to record, using OBS, using a drawing or playing a game at 4K30fps or 1080p60fps respectively just fine.

But that is after quite a bit of tweaking.

 

Also, that is with setting CPU affinity, which makes it so Windows allocates X amount of cores to whatever program and Y amount of cores to another. For games I have 4 cores set to the game, other 12 to recording, with drawing programs I make it 6 to 10.

 

But you could also look into things like Quicksync (Intel) or Nvenc (Nvidia) and in those cases the amount of cores aren't really important anymore.

[SpiralTTGL]

1 minute ago, Enderman said:

If you stream using nvenc or quicksync then your CPU cores don't really matter.

ah yes! forgot this was an option for nvidia cards tho the quality won't be as good as cpu encoding but most people won't tell the difference

[Picklestine]

whats your budget? like the i9 9900k will let you stream and game like a boss but you could probably get away with a r5 1600 for overwatch streaming with a 1070 

[Fasauceome]

Even the ryzen 5 1400 would be nice to stream on (at least better than A regular laptop 4 core), so it depends on what you're spending.

[ZihanYu]

1 minute ago, Picklestine said:

whats your budget? like the i9 9900k will let you stream and game like a boss and you could probably get away with a r5 1600 for overwatch streaming with a 1070 

STRICT 1200 budget 

[Enderman]

4 minutes ago, SpiralTTGL said:

ah yes! forgot this was an option for nvidia cards tho the quality won't be as good as cpu encoding but most people won't tell the difference

Yeah, and only large streamers get access to stuff like 8 or 10mbps upload on twitch, so unless you're a big streamer using those high bitrates it's even less likely people will notice due to all the compression.

 

Better to use nvenc/quicksync and get higher fps in game

[ZihanYu]

1 minute ago, fasauceome said:

Even the ryzen 5 1400 would be nice to stream on (at least better than A regular laptop 4 core), so it depends on what you're spending.

Ok cool, but I think I have budget to buy a more expensive chip

[SpiralTTGL]

1 minute ago, ZihanYu said:

Ok cool, but I think I have budget to buy a more expensive chip

ryzen 1800x price to performance is quite nice if you want 2700x bumps the performance up even further but cost 100$ more

[ZihanYu]

13 minutes ago, SpiralTTGL said:

for streaming I would highly recommend ryzen even first generation would do the job

ryzen 1800x or 2700x

 

with streaming and gaming more cores the better this also won't bottleneck a 1070 far from it

 

5 minutes ago, SpiralTTGL said:

ryzen 1800x price to performance is quite nice if you want 2700x bumps the performance up even further but cost 100$ more

Ok cool, but 1st gen thridripper(1900x) is basically the same price, so what about that? 

[Sfekke]

25 minutes ago, Enderman said:

If you stream using nvenc or quicksync then your CPU cores don't really matter.

While this is true, quality with NV.ENC is far from what I'd call top notch.

If you can afford a new CPU to encode your stream with, do so.

[mariushm]

For streaming, it's up to YOU if you need cores or not.

 

If you want the absolute highest quality, software encoding is the preferred method, and that means the more cores and the higher the frequency, the more processing power you can give the software encoder to encode your video using as high quality settings as possible.

 

However, you can trade off a bit of quality and let the video card do the actual video encoding, in which case only a tiny bit of the processing power is required for encoding the audio part of your stream and for talking back and forth with your video card (sending video frames to the video card, waiting for video card to encode the frames, downloading the encoded frames from the video card, mixing the encoded video frames with the encoded audio frames and so on)

 

So if you have a GT 1050 or higher video card, you can use nVidia's hardware encoding to encode the video and the what cpu you have matters less, as long as it's powerful enough to run your games.

On AMD's side, the RX video cards all have AMF and hardware encoding, so you can also use these features to minimize the cpu requirements.

 

If you want to use stricty software encoding, then I would say it would be best to go with at least 6 cores, like a Ryzen 2600 or whatever Intel equivalent is. 

Intel processors with integrated video cards also have Quicksync which is something similar to the hardware encoding stuff nVidia and AMD has .. basically, offloads the video encoding to these specialized portions of the processor, so the whole processor can be used for gaming.

As far as I know, the quality of Quicksync is a bit worse than nVdia's and AMD's solution though.

 

Threadripper is great for software only encoding, but it's a bit worse for gaming in general.  Keep in mind that threadripper motherboards are more expensive and you also need a stronger cooler (and must be for that socket TR4, which is bigger than AM4 or othe sockets) while if you buy a Ryzen CPU you could use the stock cpu cooler just fine.

Also, the Threadripper processors are made out of two ryzen dies, and there will be a tiny performance loss and games will prefer to use only one of those Ryzen dies, so most games will favor only 4 of the 8 cores inside a threadripper 1900x. For software encoding, it would be very good as the software encoder is perfectly happy to use all those cores but games are more picky about how the cpu is internally built. 

 

[flibberdipper]

31 minutes ago, SpiralTTGL said:

ah yes! forgot this was an option for nvidia cards tho the quality won't be as good as cpu encoding but most people won't tell the difference

Know I'm late on this, but honestly the difference between NVENC (or whatever AMD's version is called) and CPU encoding really isn't that bad even when you set the bitrates to retard levels. In my experience AMD's encoder was a bit worse (on my 7950) in the sense that some more detail was lost and colors were a bit off, though in all fairness that could have just been the result of my card in particular being shit.

[mariushm]

9 minutes ago, flibberdipper said:

Know I'm late on this, but honestly the difference between NVENC (or whatever AMD's version is called) and CPU encoding really isn't that bad even when you set the bitrates to retard levels. In my experience AMD's encoder was a bit worse (on my 7950) in the sense that some more detail was lost and colors were a bit off, though in all fairness that could have just been the result of my card in particular being shit.

The new RX cards and onward use AMF (AMD Media Framework) which is much better than VCE which was used on your 7950.

VCE had quite a few "bugs" and a lot of configurable options didn't even work (or were silently ignored).  AMF is more advanced and exposes more settings allowing you to trade quality for speed or the other way around if you so desire.

[flibberdipper]

3 minutes ago, mariushm said:

The new RX cards and onward use AMF (AMD Media Framework) which is much better than VCE which was used on your 7950.

VCE had quite a few "bugs" and a lot of configurable options didn't even work (or were silently ignored).  AMF is more advanced and exposes more settings allowing you to trade quality for speed or the other way around if you so desire.

Suppose that's good to know, at least. I used OBS (which may or may not have been a contributing factor, who really knows), but I can say with certainty that ReLive was absolute trash. When it did work, the video was either horrible quality, dropped frames like a mother, or the audio and video were out of sync and/or stretched. It also wouldn't let me go above 1080p60 24Mbps, whereas with OBS I could do 2560x1440 45Mbps no problem.

[Enderman]

3 hours ago, Sfekke said:

While this is true, quality with NV.ENC is far from what I'd call top notch.

If you can afford a new CPU to encode your stream with, do so.

99% of kids on twitch won't be able to tell a difference.

Even in linus' comparison they had too zoom into the screen to be able to tell a difference.