Discussing streaming means talking about how content is delivered over the internet for on-demand viewing.
Discussing streaming means talking about how content is delivered over the internet for on-demand viewing.
You can lower the load by employing a capture card. For a relatively recent setup, you might skip one altogether. What CPU, GPU, and motherboard do you have? Contemporary Intel chips (Sandy Bridge or newer with built-in GPU plus video output ports) along with AMD (Radeon 7000 series or newer) and Nvidia GPUs (650 or newer) all allow video encoding in dedicated hardware, so it won’t consume CPU resources.
GPU is an EVGA GeForce GTX 960 with overclocking and 4GB RAM. CPU runs an Intel Core i5 4690k with a 3.5GHz clock speed on a quad-core processor. Motherboard is Asus Z97-A. RAM comes from Corsair Vengeance 8GB (two 4GB modules). Storage includes a 1TB Western Digital Blue 7200 RPM HDD and a 240GB Intel SSD. The case is NZXT S340 Black, running Windows 10. Monitor is an Asus VX228H 21.5-inch display with two monitors. Keyboard and mouse are Corsair K65 RGB and M65 RGB models. What you meant by "dedicated hardware" isn’t clear—could you clarify?
Okay good, you won't need a capture card. 1) Open OBS 2) Go into " Settings... " 3) Go to the " Encoding " 4) Where it says " Encoder: x264 " CHANGE that to " Nvidia NVENC " I don't know if there is anything else you should do since I don't have an Nvidia card, but hopefully that will work. You should see your CPU usage go down dramatically if it works. What I mean with "dedicated hardware" is that the parts I listed (Intel CPU, Nvidia and Nvidia GPUs) got specialized parts inside of them which can only do video encoding/decoding. It might be a bit hard to grasp without showing pictures, but you can imagine it as your graphics card having another processor inside it. That processor can only handle videos. Right now it is just sitting there doing nothing, but if you configure your software correctly you can let that processor do the video encoding. Since it is specifically designed to do video encoding, it is really fast and efficient at doing just that.
If it works, I’ll be happy for you. I’ll let you know in about 10 to 15 minutes.
It varies based on other configuration options. The default x264 settings in OBS aren’t great. Since I don’t have an Nvidia GPU, I can’t verify the quality directly, but Intel QuickSync performs reasonably well and often surpasses x264 in both quality and performance.