General Support

[Ramana S R]

Hi

I tried using OBS Studio on my Toshiba laptop for recording a video - camera and screen plus audio. I had few audio filters and also changed the background. The out put was awful. Realised that my laptop was for general business purpose only.

Hence, planning to get a new one and I need your help.

The following are the specification of four models short listed:

1. MacBook Air M1, 8-Core CPU, 7-Core GPU, 8GB Unified Memory, 256GB SSD Storage, 16‑core Neural Engine.

2. HP Victus Gaming Laptop 40.9 cm 16-s0095AX - AMD Ryzen™ 7 processor, Windows 11 Home, 40.9 cm (16.1) diagonal FHD display, NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 3050, 16 GB RAM DDR5,
512 GB PCIe® Gen4 NVMe™ Hard drive

3. HP ZBook Firefly 35.6 cm (14) G10 A Mobile Workstation PC - AMD Ryzen™ 7 PRO processor, 1 TB SSD Hard drive,
Windows 11 Pro, 35.6 cm (14) diagonal WUXGA display with AMD Radeon™ 780M Graphics, 16 GB DDR5-5600 MHz RAM (1 x 16 GB).

4. HP ZBook Firefly 35.6 cm (14) G10 A Mobile Workstation PC - AMD Ryzen™ 5 PRO processor, 512 GB SSD Hard drive,
Windows 11 Pro, 35.6 cm (14) diagonal WUXGA display with AMD Radeon™ 760M Graphics, 16 GB DDR5-5600 MHz RAM (1 x 16 GB).

Of these 4, which one would be best suited to run OBS Studio based on the Processor, RAM, and Graphics Card?

Your inputs are highly appreciated. Your help in this regard means a lot to me.

Thank you in advance.

BR,
Ramana.

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

Simple, see MacOS threads for current 'challenges' with latest MacOS updates, changing OS security expectations, and 3rd party device support.
By Design MacBook Air (and any comparable Intel/AMD laptop) is thin and light for long-battery life, not high performance (power/thermally constrained). But depending on your setup, may be more than powerful enough.. no way for any of us to know with what you've posted. Is OBS Studio highly optimized for the relatively new ARM architecture on Mac computers... not that I'm aware of [work i nprogress]. The whole industry will take time to create open-source libraries for the new Apple CPU architecture, and optimize accordingly. Some stuff works great now.. others not so much

As for the Windows PCs, the specs you list are inadequate to compare.. a Ryzen 5 or 7 is a family, across many generations, with different capabilities, performance, etc.

With that said, I'd recommend you ask yourself, what is the useable life you expect of this system? and how much 'futzing' are you willing to deal with? Others will tell you that all consumer GPU encoding isn't all that great, but does minimize CPU impact for consumer workloads. meaning, you have to decide what video quality target you are looking for. Presuming you aren't planning Theater big-screen quality levels, you should be fine with real-time consumer h/w encoding.
In the future, I expect AV1 (or some variant of it) to become standard, vs H.264 now (H.265 a well-known licensing mess). And AV1 h/w encoding requires newer nVidia 4xxx series (and similar for AMD). AMD focused on H.265 (presumably not expecting the licensing mess) and their H.264 has not been all that great (recent update ...may.. have addressed some of this, but from other threads, just as possible that GPUs themselves aren't competitive to nVidia on H.264 encoding offload [Others have commented that AMD GPU encode in general is sub-par... but do NOT take my word for that...].
So in your case, the question is what are you going to edit with? and are you ok with not being able to livestream with comparable video quality to current CDNs is using AMD GPU/H.264? Ie, if no livestreaming, then possible to Encode using AMD and H.265, and then edit in that.. but beware that has its own workflow considerations, and that is NOT my area of expertise... just mentioning a consideration / maybe possibility??

Will you want to do 4K video? The higher resolution needs/benefits from more VRAM.. though how much difference it makes depends on your video editor, with DaVinci Resolve or Premier Pro each being slightly different, and those being different form lower-end tools (which may be a much better fit for you... it just depends).

Considering the RTX 3050, I'm guessing these are close-outs of prior generation (approx 1yr old) laptops?

As for workload, some of those OBS Studio filters, especially chroma-keying can be CPU intensive. Depending on what else you have running, you may overload your system. And laptops, by their very nature/design, can't handle heat as well as a typical desktop. Will laptop thermal throttling impact you? no way for any of us to know. There are lots of mitigating steps that can be taken within Operating System and other workloads to reduce hardware resource (CPU, GPU, RAM, Disk I/O, etc) demands... but whether those changes are a. something you are comfortable and willing to do; 2 appropriate for your setup; 3 sufficient... would all be something you have to determine.

Why am I saying all this? because, depending on your workloads and settings, you might need a super expensive top-end professional workstation, or you may only need a couple of year old system, or something in between? it depends.