Look better? 720@30 2500 bitrate would "look" better.
48 looks fine in many cases while 45 doesn't look smooth. Anway, this is where we will just have to disagree
not at all. its based on the concept of dropped frames ratio the same way that 30fps works. which is a 1:2 ratio of dropped frames. 48fps is a 1:5 ratio which means 1 out of 5 frames are dropped based on a standard 60Hz monitor. another example is 54fps which is 1:10 radio. anyway, we can just disagree :P
https://gist.github.com/490a50bb11b6830684f8
you are sitting a little high on the duplicate frames (needs to stay well under 1%) and you are having encoder lag (this should show 0%). this is mainly because you have a mid to low end i5 and playing a CPU intensive game.
15:54:16: Total frames encoded: 509348, total frames duplicated: 6721 (1.32%)
15:54:16: Number of frames skipped due to encoder lag: 696 (0.14%)Its best not to raise bitrate above 2500 at max because you will lose viewers who might or might not buffer (on their end) and then whats the point in streaming with lost viewers! Anyway, I would leave it as is for now. I bet it looks good. as for 720@30, you could try and see if you have some more room as in the preset. change your preset to faster or fast but leave it at 720@30. this will raise the quality at the current bitrate. note that if you start lagging in game, or your duplicate frames start to get close to 1% then put the preset back where you had it before.
once you hit that 60fps, you really cant do much with presets. 540@60 would look really good at 2500 imo and no need to drop preset.
if you cant see a difference, they probably wont either, because this depends on the game.