Muf said:
Did you enable Quick Sync?
Let me explain my idiocy, first off, I absolutely love the fact that the OBS community is so involved and willing to help one another. These forums are a AWESOME, secondly, with that said, before I was even aware of OBS's existence I fell into the world of xsplit, where a majority of my streaming understanding came from...
Now, I have been using Xsplit this entire time (since May of 2012?) - about a year ago i purchased what i believe was a 2-3 year Xsplit pro service for a reasonable discount that included some (not so) neat features. When trying to find answers to minute and advanced questions, I could not find any reasonable results besides HardOCP and Toms Hardware forums, which proved some decent responses. THIS place is the holy grail of Stream troubleshooting, tech tips and all the like.
Having said that, about a month ago i downloaded OBS's and became familiar with the program, and it did not 'look' (keyword, look) so different to xsplit other than the fact that there were more in depth and unfamiliar 'optional' settings. Let me just say that using OBS to stream compared to xSplit while using the ultrabook and XCAPTURE-1 setup is like night and day... I'm literally dumbfounded, at my own ignorance i suppose.
For one thing, the flickering issues and overall jittery/sluggish user end stream quality is completely gone... (default cpu preset this entire time, 720p 60fps & quicksync off) And by the way, i do not believe xsplit has a quicksync enabling feature. As far as CPU utilization, I noticed that OBS uses slightly less CPU resources, still noticeably around the 95-100% mark, wavering, but not nearly like xsplit (which was consistently 99-100% , pretty discouraging)
Now, with Quicksync enabled CPU load went down to about 30-45% for all cores, rarely ever reaching 50%... I can say for one thing that quality takes a beating with quicksync on, nonetheless the CPU performance is outstanding. I have yet to attempt 1080p 30fps and 60fps, i will report back with the results... I have some questions,
1. Does lowering CPU presets actually effect stream quality while QuickSync is on? I had *gradually* lowered it to medium, even reaching slow and CPU utilization stayed the same on my desktop and laptop for the most part, with the quality being very unnoticeable. I will NOT be trying this with quicksync turned off seeing how when it IS turned off and CPU preset is on default, cpu load is at 95-100% as i said above.
2. In a nutshell, or maybe being somewhat descriptive, how does quicksync combine with OBS to offer such outstanding performance?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video basically describes quicksync as being speed taking priority over quality.
I can safely say that OBS is now my primary and preferred tool for streaming.