Question / Help 4K streaming- minimal requirements?

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panna_cotta

New Member
Hey guys,

First of all, My apology for maybe stupid question, I am not so friendly with computers.

I am professional webcam model. I use my old laptop with iPhone connected as camera through OBS and I am able to stream in 720p. Once I want to switch to 1080p, my computer is not enough fast for that and everything is lagged.
Now I want to buy new laptop and I have already favourite one- DELL XPS 13 i7 16GB RAM 512gb SSD
My question- Is this laptop enough fast for OBS streaming in 4k resolution or I need laptop with dedicated GPU for that?
Thanks a lot!
 
JasonVP

JasonVP

Member
panna_cotta said:
My question- Is this laptop enough fast for OBS streaming in 4k resolution or I need laptop with dedicated GPU for that?
Click to expand...

Which service are you planning to stream to with 4K?

What frame rate? 30 or 60?

Ignoring those questions, it's really important to note a few things:
1. OBS compositing a video in 4K is going to brutalize the GPU. That's before it even gets encoded and/or sent anywhere. In other words: just having OBS open with a 4K canvas is going to require the GPU to do some work.

2. No, that Dell won't be enough. It takes very powerful desktop-class GPUs to handle the compositing (without lagged/dropped frames) video of that resolution. Specially if you push 60FPS.
 
koala

koala

Active Member
To estimate how capable a device is for a wanted stream configuration, it is necessary to know exactly what CPU and GPU is built in the device. These two, in essence, determine how fit a device is for streaming.

Unfortunately, it's not clear from the Dell website what exact CPU and GPU model will be built in a "Dell XPS 13". They deliver a large variety of CPUs and GPUs under this label.

I assume you never need to capture some game from your laptop and instead stream from one or more webcams. And the stream you want to produce isn't high motion like first person action shooters, so the quality demand of the encoder is not so high. On the other hand, encoding 4k is very high computing demand.

So you may want look for a device with a 8th generation Intel i7 CPU (look for the 8xxx as number) and a nvidia GTX Graphics processor (look for GTX 10xx). GTX cards have NVENC as hardware encoder, which is able to effortlessly encode 4k almost without CPU requirement.

By the way, getting a desktop PC is better if you have space for your PC equipment and no actual need for mobility. Laptops are a compromise between mobility, power consumption and weight. They get increasingly more expensive, the more CPU (and GPU) power you require.
 
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TryHD

Member
What will be source to get a 4k video feed? Webcams just upscale 1080p or less to 2160p, so you would need a camcorder which does output 2160p via hdmi or sdi so we look at 600+€ for the camcorder or x2 or x3 depending on how much angles you want to cover + 400€ or more for a capture card, depending on how many sources you have.

@panna_cotta A good 1080p source will look always better than a crappy 4k one, so knowing your video source is important to give you tips.
 
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