AMD Radeon Pro 5700 XT 16 GB graphics

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StevePugh

New Member
Dear all, I recently upgraded from my 2016 Macbook Pro to a 2020 iMac. I purposely went for the better graphics card for streaming, but within OBS I'm not sure how to get the most from my system? I stream business interviews onto YouTube and LinkedIn etc via Restream.IO.

I only have the Encoder option "Software (x264)" available, with the Encoder Preset set to Fast.

Will the Custom Encoder Setting "opencl=true" help use the graphics card, or is that still buggy? Open to suggestions. Many thanks in advance.

iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2020)
3.8 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i7
72 GB 2667 MHz DDR4
AMD Radeon Pro 5700 XT 16 GB

OBS 25.0.8
macOS Catalina v10.15.6
 
Nass86

Nass86

Member
The guys at OBS seem to have stopped responding to any of my questions in here but its bad news: OBS doesn't support anything in terms of Graphics cards on Mac, you have to use X264.

From all the research I've tried to glean in here, you need a Windows PC or Laptop with an NVIDIA Graphics card to use an encoder called NVENC to get the best from OBS.

I hope OBS figure out a way to do what Ecamm Live does as they don't have the same issues and the quality is much better according to someone else who posted. But, this is a community project and OBS are unpaid, and Ecamm is paid.

I hope OBS figure out a way to make use of the power the Macs have as they behave as if they're 5 to 10 years older compared with a Windows machine on the same spec at the minute. There has to be a solution. I love OBS and the add ons!
 
Nass86

Nass86

Member
For what its worth I get a better quality stream from a 2011 iMac 2.5ghz i5 8gb Ram and AMD Radeon 6750M on High Sierra than I do on my newer Macbook Pro 2015 2.5ghz i7 with 16GB Ram, AMD Radeon R9 M370X on Mojave, which in terms of hardware should perform better.
 
Nass86

Nass86

Member
I have wondered if you can install Windows on Bootcamp on your Mac and if that would allow you to use an Encoder effectively. But nobody here is responding to that question and I would be up for paying for a Windows licence and trying it if it could be confirmed.
 
S

StevePugh

New Member
Hi Nass86, thanks for all of the feedback. It's good to know. My stream is fairly basic so upgrading my machine should certainly help, and I never really had any problems before. I just wanted to maximise what I have... but I guess I'll just try a few things.

Nass86 said:
I have wondered if you can install Windows on Bootcamp on your Mac and if that would allow you to use an Encoder effectively. But nobody here is responding to that question and I would be up for paying for a Windows licence and trying it if it could be confirmed.
Click to expand...
 
M

mini5apple

New Member
Nass86 said:
I have wondered if you can install Windows on Bootcamp on your Mac and if that would allow you to use an Encoder effectively. But nobody here is responding to that question and I would be up for paying for a Windows licence and trying it if it could be confirmed.
Click to expand...

windows 10 is free to download direct from Microsoft
 
S

StevePugh

New Member
I tried max settings on OBS as a test to see if if was using the GPU at all, and it's not. (See below). I'm going to try Windows10 as suggested via bootcamp to see if I can get better results.

CPU : GPU OBS.jpg
 
Nass86

Nass86

Member
Let me know what you make of it. Someone else did say that without the Nvidia Graphics the performance was markedly improved on a good iMac / Macbook anyway.
 
S

StevePugh

New Member
Nass86 said:
Let me know what you make of it. Someone else did say that without the Nvidia Graphics the performance was markedly improved on a good iMac / Macbook anyway.
Click to expand...

So since my last post I went through the trouble of downloading Windows 10 and installing it via BootCamp, and I also installed WarZone to test the gaming too.

With OBS, whilst it did see the AMD hardware and could use it (unlike on Mac OS), I couldn't really see too much other difference vs the results I was getting, but for the extra hassle between switching between operating systems, I have since decided to uninstall Windows and go back to 100% Mac OS.

On gaming, there were frustrations on getting it all working due to problems with Activision servers, and even once it was, the Mac Magic Mouse did not work with Warzone as you don't have the ability to right and left click at the same time (so it was useless), and even when I linked my XBox elite controller, this too didn't work properly so I decided I'd stick to my XBox One X.

My solution is just to optimise what I have using the x264 software encoding on the 8 core 10th gen processor, which is probably more than I'll ever need for streaming at 1080p.
 
M

MenziesMedia

New Member
Hey Steve, did you ever find a way to get your iMac 2020 to stream properly in OBS? Did you upgrade to Big Sur?
I have the iMac 2020 i9 with 5700xt as well as so far I can’t figure out what the optimal settings should be.
im getting dropped frames due to rendering lag and find I’m having to delete things in my sources and scenes to put less strain on the cpu.
I was streaming on an IMac late 2015 quad i7 and 720/30 worked fine. Your help would be more than appreciated. I also run Bootcamp for my music daw FL Studios…I read somewhere that you could update the gpu on the windows side and it would help on the Mac side but haven’t seen any difference from doing that. Sigh
 
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