Question / Help CPU Usage

N

NewKID

New Member
while streaming, is the frequency (speed) or the amount of cores more important?

i havent found a solid answer. the i5 is very efficient with four cores, but does the 8320/8350 have an advantage with eight cores?
 
Boildown

Boildown

Active Member
They're both important. Its hard to say beyond the 4/8 core CPUs because no one has done that kind of testing yet. But an 8320 will be significantly faster than an i5 for OBS. If you're running OBS and your game on the same PC, then it depends on your game too, as most games love clockspeed and are poorly multithreaded. The i7s are the best in both departments, and the Haswell CPUs in general have a very good Quicksync option that can trump other concerns depending on what you want to do.
 
Videophile

Videophile

Elgato
Well, technically X264 can use up to 22 threads before losing efficiency.

Either way, the more cores/ghz the better. Cores are more important however.

-Shrimp
 
N

NewKID

New Member
Boildown said:
They're both important. Its hard to say beyond the 4/8 core CPUs because no one has done that kind of testing yet. But an 8320 will be significantly faster than an i5 for OBS. If you're running OBS and your game on the same PC, then it depends on your game too, as most games love clockspeed and are poorly multithreaded. The i7s are the best in both departments, and the Haswell CPUs in general have a very good Quicksync option that can trump other concerns depending on what you want to do.
Click to expand...
interesting. both cpu's at stock?
 
Videophile

Videophile

Elgato
Sapiens said:
Out of curiosity where did you get this number? The material I've seen regarding x264 and threads tends to recommend 16 threads as the sane limit before you start seeing quality loss, particularly with CBR.

You are correct, it is 16, my mistake. I read somewhere that anything above 16 will yield a less-than-noticeable improvement.

-Shrimp
Click to expand...
 
Videophile

Videophile

Elgato
NewKID said:
interesting
Click to expand...
Hyperthreading is extremely important while streaming. It is not as useful in gaming, as game engines generally cant make use of more than 4 threads, but X264 and video encoding can use whatever threads they can get. X264's limit is 128 threads.
 
V

vbdkv

Member
I was streaming Anno 2070 on an FX-8320 and all 8 cores were being worked. Never seen that before, but I didn't notice any performance drops at all. I'm sure a quad would have trouble.
 
N

NewKID

New Member
LtRoyalShrimp said:
Hyperthreading is extremely important while streaming. It is not as useful in gaming, as game engines generally cant make use of more than 4 threads, but X264 and video encoding can use whatever threads they can get. X264's limit is 128 threads.
Click to expand...
oh wow i didnt know hyperthreading was used for streaming.

vbdkv said:
I was streaming Anno 2070 on an FX-8320 and all 8 cores were being worked. Never seen that before, but I didn't notice any performance drops at all. I'm sure a quad would have trouble.
Click to expand...
just curious, are you overclocked?
 
Boildown

Boildown

Active Member
How many cores x264 can use efficiently entirely depends on the resolution. For small resolutions its quite limited, for 4k it will probably be quite a bit. Just saying "it can use 16" or "22" isn't very good unless you specify which resolution you're encoding at. Even then, at the extremely high core counts, its not clear at all if its better to have an 8/16 CPU running at a higher clockrate or a 15/30 CPU running at slower clockrates (assuming money no object). If you check Intel's product sheets, all the really high core count CPUs (8/16 and up, basically) have increasingly drastically reduced clockrates.
 
N

NewKID

New Member
Boildown said:
How many cores x264 can use efficiently entirely depends on the resolution. For small resolutions its quite limited, for 4k it will probably be quite a bit. Just saying "it can use 16" or "22" isn't very good unless you specify which resolution you're encoding at. Even then, at the extremely high core counts, its not clear at all if its better to have an 8/16 CPU running at a higher clockrate or a 15/30 CPU running at slower clockrates (assuming money no object). If you check Intel's product sheets, all the really high core count CPUs (8/16 and up, basically) have increasingly drastically reduced clockrates.
Click to expand...
how can this be resolved?
 
N

NewKID

New Member
thanks for the referral. i just registered but i have to wait five days before i make my first post/thread lol
 
Jack0r

Jack0r

The Helping Squad
Its actually pretty simple, each smallest setting, each encoder update, each new cpu generation, each current generation will behave differently and change the results, sometimes dramatically.
The content you use to test changes the behavior of the encoder probably just as much as your settings. And finding the perfect all around content is pretty hard. I tested 10 different games recently for encoding quality differences and got 10 different results.
Benchmarks for x264 often just test the maximum fps it can encode at setting XY. Which is not really helpful for streaming anyway because it will use a fixed fps value to encode and cannot do more or less. So such benchmark, at best, can tell us if we will have a bit of free room left. And they have the content problem as well. Did they use fast, medium, slow or mixed content to do the benchmark? But what if your content is fast without any slow downs, or you just play a slow game of chess and have no fast content changes at all?
I look at people asking for the perfect settings all day, and can only just laugh before I tell them: THERE ARE NO PERFECT SETTINGS :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top