Bitrate no longer goes above 700 while streaming

Mvgan

New Member
Hi all, sorry in advance if this post is a bit rambly/ not formatted well- this is my first post on here and I'm not super savvy with PC stuff, but I'll do my best to explain everything properly.

I stream on twitch a couple of times a week, my last stream was November 18th and everything ran well. I went to stream yesterday and my bitrate was in the red and would not go over 700-800, and I was at around 60% dropped frames while on my starting screen. OBS didn't crash during this, but my stream was unwatchable/ constantly buffering. Over the last couple of days I've followed instructions from posts on here, Reddit, and advice from a friend who's quite familiar with OBS and optimized all the setting I can, I've done a clean install of my graphics drivers, and even uninstalled and reinstalled OBS in case I had a corrupt file/ bad install after the most recent update.

We also did a test recording and everything was fine visually- no dropped frames or poor resolution etc. I've also tried multiple test streams within OBS after changing which server I'm connected to (I live in New Zealand so I've tried connecting to Indonesia, Singapore, and both Sydney, Australia servers as they're the closest) and all of my test streams have the same 700-800 bitrate, although my dropped frame issue seems mostly resolved from the other tweaking that I've done. I also tried a couple of test streams from Stream Elements OBS to rule out it being an issue solely with OBS.

When I reinstalled OBS and ran the Auto Configuration Wizard, it determined that the recommended video bitrate for my system is 497Kbps despite me streaming comfortably at 3000Kbps last week. It also recommended that my output resolution should be set at 426x240 and I have no idea why. I haven't changed anything in the last week, or even opened OBS between my last stream and yesterday. There may have been a Windows update in the last week but I can't remember off the top of my head.

If anyone has any advice or potential fixes for this, please let me know as my friends and I are at a loss and don't know where to go from here. Thank you in advance.
 
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