Question / Help Can't seem to find a sweet spot for decent quality.

[Laur1x]

What's up, guys. So long story short I wanted to give streaming a go for fun.

I did a lot of research past few days and a lot of test-runs on my end. Ultimately this is what it came down to. Here are my pc specs for context:

Gaming Rig: i5 6600k OC'd @4.4GHz, 980 GTX, 16GB RAM, 500GB SSD
Older Rig: i7 930 @3.2GHz, 660 GTX, 8GB RAM, 256 SSD

I can single pc stream on my (newer) gaming rig, but only using NVENC codec. This is at 720p/60fps, using CBR / 5k bitrate / high quality / high profile. x264 was too much for my i5 6600k while playing a CPU intensive game like H1Z1. Here is how it looked: https://clips.twitch.tv/CleanVivaciousKoalaMikeHogu

I decided to dig out my older gaming rig and test out the NDI plugin so I can dedicate one pc to CPU encoding entirely. I got it working smooth, I have a really strong home network, no problems at all, but I'm not happy with the quality. This was with x264, 5k bitrate, cpu preset "faster", profile high: https://clips.twitch.tv/AlertEnjoyableWombatBatChest

Trying the "dual pc setup" with the older rig i7 930 to handle the encoding, I couldn't lower the cpu preset more than faster. Anything below that would cause extreme stutters and 100% cpu usage. Even going to faster vs very fast I was pushing ~70-90% usage. I assume this first-gen cpu is just too old to keep up.

Is there anything else I can do at this point to achieve better quality? I really was hoping that dedicating this older pc to x264 would look better than single pc NVENC, but it looks like they are quite close in mediocre quality.

 

[SumDim]

Your i5 is 50% faster than your lower end i7 streaming box. You are now asking a much slower computer to do the encoding for you. Assuming the same CPU clock speeds, what took 1 second to do on the i5 now takes 1.5 seconds on the slower i7. The CPU usage on the i7 can be much higher than what you observed on the i5 baseline. If it is, you may not even be able to lower the x264 CPU preset significantly to make any quality difference at all.

The streaming box needs to be at least as powerful as the gaming box to give you wiggle room to dive deep into the lower CPU presets. It needs to be a significant CPU change to give you a big CPU % usage difference to make it worth the cost and time.

 

[Laur1x]

Your i5 is 50% faster than your lower end i7 streaming box. You are now asking a much slower computer to do the encoding for you. Assuming the same CPU clock speeds, what took 1 second to do on the i5 now takes 1.5 seconds on the slower i7. The CPU usage on the i7 can be much higher than what you observed on the i5 baseline. If it is, you may not even be able to lower the x264 CPU preset significantly to make any quality difference at all.

The streaming box needs to be at least as powerful as the gaming box to give you wiggle room to dive deep into the lower CPU presets. It needs to be a significant CPU change to give you a big CPU % usage difference to make it worth the cost and time.

Gotcha. Yeah I just wanted to give it a try regardless since I couldn't x264 CPU Encode on my gaming rig at all. My i5 gets eaten up in usage for most games I play. I guess I'll just NVENC single pc stream then. I plan on doing a full rebuild later this year, do you think turning my current gaming rig into a streaming rig will suffice, or will the i5 6600k oc'd fall flat for pure cpu encoding still?

 

[SumDim]

Yes, for now you will have to NVENC it.

I would gut out the i5 and replace it with a Ryzen 1600 + AM4 mobo. I think you will be pleased with that for doing 720@60.

 

[Beast96GT]

It's amazing how much power it takes to encode the x264, isn't it? The only way to get good quality on a highly textured game with a lot of fast motion (unless you have unlimited bitrate!) is to crank up the x264 preset. I can't speak to the Ryzen, but I run an i7 8700K on the streaming PC and with BF1, I run 6K bitrate / 720p @ 60 on the slow preset--and it uses about 30% of the CPU. I think it looks good. I'm still testing and playing around with the settings, but if you skip into this video a bit you can get a good idea of the quality:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/242185976

Granted I'm still trying to figure out the best way to deal with the 21:9 monitor...

-Beast