# Which downscale filter to use?



## Deleted member 246571 (Jun 30, 2020)

Use case: typically gaming 
Specs: not relevant, this is the OBS setup for the most capable machines
Trying to figure out wether to use Bicubic vs Lanczos, heard that Lanczos is just unnecessary stress on the system but it has a higher sample count (not going to pretend I know what that means) which one yields better quality, that is the only concern


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## FerretBomb (Jun 30, 2020)

The processing load difference between bicubic and lanczos is negligible on any hardware that isn't a complete potato with no business even trying to livestream. Ignore the performance delta as it's unspeakably tiny.

Normally bicubic is recommended. It's a standard rescale and provides good quality.
Lanczos is more of a personal-preference/situational thing; it's normally used for face-cams and other real-life video... it does have a higher sampling count, and OBS' implementation includes a sharpen pass; good for real video, not so much for synthetic video (like gameplay) where you may get some minor over-sharpen artifacting (like halo effects in solid color blocks). But you likely won't even notice unless you're specifically looking for it.

Default: bicubic (especially for full-frame downscales)
Face-cam: right-click, Scale Filtering, Lanczos


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## ees420smokin (Jul 26, 2021)

Lanczos made my stream laggy as hell. Went back to bicubic and it works perfect. my upload is 30mbps and my hardware is AMD ryzen 7 3700x and gtx 1660 super. no hardware or ISP limitations so what gives? Lanczos is a turd do not use folks.



FerretBomb said:


> The processing load difference between bicubic and lanczos is negligible on any hardware that isn't a complete potato with no business even trying to livestream. Ignore the performance delta as it's unspeakably tiny.
> 
> Normally bicubic is recommended. It's a standard rescale and provides good quality.
> Lanczos is more of a personal-preference/situational thing; it's normally used for face-cams and other real-life video... it does have a higher sampling count, and OBS' implementation includes a sharpen pass; good for real video, not so much for synthetic video (like gameplay) where you may get some minor over-sharpen artifacting (like halo effects in solid color blocks). But you likely won't even notice unless you're specifically looking for it.
> ...


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