Question / Help 1080p 30fps Stream and Record - Spec Required

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littlewyan

New Member
Hi Everyone

I'm new to the forum and I'm after some advice......I want to record and stream gigs to Facebook or Youtube at 1080p 30fps (I've heard that 1080p 60fps is a waste of time right now), but I'm not sure what spec machine I need. I've done lots of Googling, but can't find any concrete info on what's required. It needs to be a laptop as I do sometimes record at other venues. For the Cameras I'm using a Roland Video Mixer that plugs into the laptop via USB. So I believe I'm right in saying the Laptop isn't doing anything camera wise, it's just taking a feed from the Video Mixer.

What sort of spec would I be looking at? Intel Core i7 8750H? 16GB RAM? SSD?
 
Narcogen

Narcogen

Active Member
If this laptop will be sitting between your cameras and Facebook or YouTube, then it's encoding video, which isn't nothing.

1080p60 is a difficult target to hit; you should probably target 720p60 for fast motion content and 1080p30 for other kinds of content.

You should still get the strongest laptop with the strongest GPU you can justify. Laptops are not great for streaming, and the same power in laptop form costs more than in desktop form. Laptops also have other limitations that desktops don't with regard to capturing content and streaming (probably not relevant for you if you're just doing cameras.

How much power you need will depend on how many cameras you want and what quality you want to get out of them. The more bandwidth each camera uses, and the more capture devices you connect to the laptop, the stronger the laptop needs to be (and you also should limit the number of cameras you put on a single USB hub, so the number of USB controllers the laptop has-- not ports-- may also be important.

Getting a laptop with an Nvidia GPU that supports NVENC can also be useful if you aren't doing high motion content, as it reduces the load on your CPU.
 
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littlewyan

New Member
We have 7 cameras, but they all go into a Roland Video Mixer which gives us a single feed over USB in OBS. So the laptop is only capturing one feed at a time, we don't connect the cameras directly to the laptop. I'm guessing this makes using 1080p 30fps for fast motion content a more realistic goal?

With regards to the laptop limitations, are you talking about the dual GPU issue people have? Where they try to do screen capture, but OBS tries to rely on the integrated graphics rather than the high performance GPU?
 
Narcogen

Narcogen

Active Member
It is not OBS trying to rely on the integrated GPU.

When performing screen capture on a laptop with both integrated and discrete GPUs, OBS *must* run on the integrated GPU; it is a limitation enforced by the design of the laptop.

For a single camera feed you should not have any special requirements with regard to rendering power.
 
Narcogen

Narcogen

Active Member
Well, the best you can justify. Not suggesting anybody break the bank, but it's easy to find ways for OBS to consume as much GPU as you can throw at it.
 
Narcogen

Narcogen

Active Member
I am seeing multiple complaints from 20XX users. I don't know if it's just that the users with no problems aren't talking about the cards, or if there's some issue with the new cards and the new NVENC encoder or what.

I went with a 1660 because I wanted the Turing encoder, but don't need ray tracing.
 
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littlewyan

New Member
Oh, that's odd. Especially since Nvidia announced that they worked with OBS to add support for their new Encoder on these cards.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce/news/geforce-rtx-streaming/

Ill try to find a laptop with the 1660. From what I can gather, the 2060 may be a waste a money anyway as I won't benefit from it if I'm only using its encoder. Compared to the 1660 anyway.

Edit: I thought the 1660 was an RTX card!
 
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Narcogen

Narcogen

Active Member
No, the 1660 is NOT an RTX card. It's official designation is GTX 1660 or GTX 1660Ti. It has the Turing encoder chip, but NOT ray tracing. Don't know if there is a mobile version, have not looked.

My understanding is that the problems with the 20XX is not in the encoding, but stutter similar to the micro-stutter people with 1 PC Nvidia setups have described in the past that does NOT show up as either rendering or encoding lag in an OBS log.
 
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littlewyan

New Member
Oh that's interesting. Ill do some reading up on that.

Just to make sure I understand all of this correctly. If I use the NVENC encoder, then my CPU won't have to do much as all the load will be on the GPU. If I buy a laptop without a GPU, I could just use the CPU for encoding. Is that right? Or, is it always best to buy a laptop with a GPU, even if I don't choose to do hardware encoding?
 
Narcogen

Narcogen

Active Member
If you use the NVENC encoder, then the CPU is not involved in encoding at all.

If you buy a laptop without a discrete GPU, you'll likely still have an integrated GPU, almost certainly Intel, with which you could use the QuickSync encoder. (Your CPU now probably has that option, but there's little reason to use it if you have NVENC.)

For the purposes of OBS, it's almost always better to have a discrete GPU, though, because of the need to render frames. But in laptops, this brings up other limitations-- you won't be able to do Display captures unless running on the integrated GPU, and that will mean using that for rendering as well.

Laptops aren't ideal for OBS.
 
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littlewyan

New Member
I think this makes sense now. So either way the GPU will be used by OBS.

Unfortunately with what we do it needs to be a laptop. I know it's cheaper to use a desktop, but we really need it to be portable.

Do you think an Intel Core i7 9750H with an Nvidia 1660Ti or RTX 2060 (noting the stutter issues) would be plenty for streaming and recording 720p 60fps or 1080p 30fps?
 
Narcogen

Narcogen

Active Member
Yes, in general. Obviously it will matter how much system resources are used by the application you are capturing in a one PC setup, but in general, yes.
 
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pablofu

New Member
Hi guys, I am very interested in this exchange of info, since I am searching for a good portable solution. If not a laptop, is there a mini-pc that could work? I love macs, and I do have a MBP 2018 i7 with horrible graphics (Intel Iris Plus Graphics 655 1536 MB) and it just sucks...Thanks a lot for your suggestions.
 
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m3yl0r0d

New Member
I really love the built-in x264 encoder and how great it can look, even though I have a GTX 1660 Ti that can handle the load.

So what I do is use a dedicated computer for encoding usng OBS NDI on a gigabit hardwired network. This encoding computer has a Ryzen 6-cores processor, 32 gb RAM and encodes at 6000 kbps at 30 fps with the CPU usage set to "faster". These settings keep the CPU load at less than 20%.

It looks fantastic!!!
 
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