Question / Help Best res to stream at with 1440p canvas?

[TGODneilan]

Hey all,

so i've been streaming for awhile with my 1440p monitor and base canvas set at 2560x1440p in OBS. I had been streaming at 1600x900 as thats just what i had it at before with my 1080p monitor. After doing some research i found some resolutions that in general were just more recommended as theyre divisible by 8 and therefor better encoding resolutions apparently. Currently im testing 1536x864. heres a quick clip of what it looks like playing Modern Warfare.

Settings for this vid are:
Base Res: 2560x1440p
Output Res: 1536x864 at 60fps
Downscale Filter: Lanczos
x264 Fast preset at 7k bitrate on a 9900k
no custom buffer size, Keyframe interval at 2, and profile on High.

https://clips.twitch.tv/BoxyFamousHyenaSuperVinlin
i tried to find a small clip where there were quick moments with a lot going on and couple pretty still moments.

overall i feel like it looks okay. Better than it did at 1600x900. Call of Duty is a fast paced game with a lot of stuff going on at times and with the limited bitrate from twitch theres only so much you can do. I just notice a lot of times the text for the killfeed in the bottom left (and other thinner text), even sometimes when the picture is still, looks fairly pixelated. And the video in general sometimes feels slightly hazy/blurry. Could just be me being paranoid chasing "the best" picture i can, but i feel like other streams at similar resolutions/specs seem to look "Clearer" than mine. So im just wondering if maybe 1664x936 output could help enough to clean up some text/blurriness. or if its more just bitrate/encoding speed related.

Any help or tips anyone might have to help clean the stream up some more is greatly appreciated! I havent ever really done any searching but are there any special x264 options that can help with encoding to get a clearer picture? Thanks again for anything im generally just looking for input and help on cleaning up the quality of my video feed.

 

[Deleted member 121471]

In my humble opinion, unless you're streaming a game with low motion or very text heavy, specially if the fonts are particularly small, there's no real benefit of going over 720p@60FPS, since the vast majority of viewers use their phones or watch on regular monitors with the chat open.

720p also has the added benefit of being a factor of 1440p, which means far less downscale "blur".

For any additional recommendations, you'll need to post a logfile of a streaming session.

https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/please-post-a-log-with-your-issue-heres-how.23074/

 

[TGODneilan]

Thanks for the recommendation! I haven't tried streaming at 720p since back when i used NVENC before i built my new rig. So it will be something i'll try in an upcoming stream and see how it turns out. Back then using the New NVENC encoding on my rtx 2080 tho, 720p tended to seem very blurry (imo, obviously) compared to 1600x900. with 1600x900 not getting too pixelated with the bitrate provided. which is why i opted to stream at that res back then. I was also using 1080p canvas then as well tho. i hadnt thought of the fact 720p is also a factor of 1440p. So again thank u and i will be trying it out!

As for anything else you might want to look at and recommend. here is a log from my most recent stream last night. Thanks again!

 

[Deleted member 121471]

1) Enable "Game mode", under Windows 10 settings, "Gaming" category;

2) Capturing camera input at 1080p while streaming at a lower resolution is a waste of resources, change camera capture resolution to 720p, since you have a scene with fullscreen cam;

3) NVENC (New) outputs quality somewhere between x264 fast and Medium with significantly lower performance hit so it is generally recommend to use it.

Rate Control: CBR
Preset: Quality
Lookahead: Disabled
Psycho Visual Tuning: Disabled

If it runs well, you could try turning on the last setting for a bit higher quality but it requires testing per game title streamed.

 

[TryHD]

I have a 9900k too and stream with this settings.
Bitrate 8200 Kbps
CPU Usage Preset medium
custom x264 options

rc-lookahead=60 trellis=1 direct-pred=spatial

Base Canvas and Output both at 1920x1080
60 FPS
The Scaling from 1440p to 1080p i do in the Sources tab because than all other elements like overlays and so on don't get scaled.
For the game Source right click on it and click transform -> fit to screen and click it again and set the scale filtering to lanczos.
With 1080p you avoid that the viewer device has to scale again which gave in my experience a better result than having their browser to scale again.

 

[TGODneilan]

1) Enable "Game mode", under Windows 10 settings, "Gaming" category;

2) Capturing camera input at 1080p while streaming at a lower resolution is a waste of resources, change camera capture resolution to 720p, since you have a scene with fullscreen cam;

3) NVENC (New) outputs quality somewhere between x264 fast and Medium with significantly lower performance hit so it is generally recommend to use it.

Rate Control: CBR
Preset: Quality
Lookahead: Disabled
Psycho Visual Tuning: Disabled

If it runs well, you could try turning on the last setting for a bit higher quality but it requires testing per game title streamed.

1) Why game mode on? Ive almost always been told to keep it off while streaming unless my game is underperforming. which its not. I stay locked at 120fps limit.

2) Thank you i honestly hadnt realized it was at 1080p. used to always be 720p.

3) Ive tested New NVENC at the same bitrate with those settings youve mentioned and im not a fan. x264 at the bitrates twitch allows is still superior in my opinion. everyones different tho.

Thank you again for the recommendations!

 

[Deleted member 121471]

1) Why game mode on? Ive almost always been told to keep it off while streaming unless my game is underperforming. which its not. I stay locked at 120fps limit.

A later Window 10 update fixed the issues it was causing while using OBS, as long as OBS is running as administrator. It is now recommended to leave it enabled.

 

[TGODneilan]

I have a 9900k too and stream with this settings.
Bitrate 8200 Kbps
CPU Usage Preset medium
custom x264 options

rc-lookahead=60 trellis=1 direct-pred=spatial

Base Canvas and Output both at 1920x1080
60 FPS
The Scaling from 1440p to 1080p i do in the Sources tab because than all other elements like overlays and so on don't get scaled.
For the game Source right click on it and click transform -> fit to screen and click it again and set the scale filtering to lanczos.
With 1080p you avoid that the viewer device has to scale again which gave in my experience a better result than having their browser to scale again.

How much CPU usage do u see while streaming at Medium preset? and are u OCed at all? Ive been meaning to try medium just hadnt yet.

And what exactly are these x264 options going to do? not really familiar with trellis or direct-pred.

I havent ever tried base canvas at 1080p and scaling in the sources tab for video feed. that actually somewhat makes sense becuz as u said. then my 1080p overlays arent being messed with. However how much bitrate is really needed for a 1080p output? ive been doing 7k as im only affiliate and dont wanna push it too high. is going up to 8k even really enough for 1080p? i guess in the end i can test this all for myself and see. Thanks so much for the recommendations! I'll have to mess with some stuff and try them out my next few streams.

 

[TGODneilan]

A later Window 10 update fixed the issues it was causing while using OBS, as long as OBS is running as administrator. It is now recommended to leave it enabled.

Okay i will try turning it on then thanks again!
just curious tho, WHY is it recommended to turn on? does it help with something for the encoding, or is it more it just frees up other resources for both the game and OBS to use.

 

[Deleted member 121471]

Okay i will try turning it on then thanks again!
just curious tho, WHY is it recommended to turn on? does it help with something for the encoding, or is it more it just frees up other resources for both the game and OBS to use.

It prioritizes OBS properly now and there's an experimental (I think) feature that seems to help prevent encoder lag, since Windows 10 is able to allocate GPU resources much more reliably. No resources are freed though, just better utilized.

 

[TryHD]

How much CPU usage do u see while streaming at Medium preset? and are u OCed at all? Ive been meaning to try medium just hadnt yet.

I run at 5 GHz all core AVX and 5.1 GHz non AVX.

And what exactly are these x264 options going to do? not really familiar with trellis or direct-pred.

That are some options from slower presets which don't cost much CPU but give a littlebit more quality.

However how much bitrate is really needed for a 1080p output? ive been doing 7k as im only affiliate and dont wanna push it too high. is going up to 8k even really enough for 1080p?

For perfect 1080p no matter what no, but for most games yes. I play some extreme hard to compress games and there are 8200 kbit/s even for 720p with x264 at slow not enough, but the gain in clearity over 720 made it worth it for me personaly.
And it doesn't matter if you are partner affliate or what ever, you can create a new account and stream 8200 kbit/s just fine, twitch doesn't make there the difference, they do it at what point you get transcoding. Partners get transcoding nearly instantly, while every other need atleast amount x of viewers to get transcoding.

i guess in the end i can test this all for myself and see. Thanks so much for the recommendations! I'll have to mess with some stuff and try them out my next few streams.

yes that is true, there are no settings which are perfect for everyones usecase in a bitrate limited world. If everybody would have 10 gbps upload you could say everybody, use a hardware encoder (nvenc, quicksync or that amd stuff) your native resultion and a quantizing encoder setting like crf or cqp and that would be perfect settings no matter what.