Bug Report High(er) CPU Usage with Avermedia Live Gamer HD

[Philodox]

I'm comparing CPU usage with OBS vs Avermedia's bundled RECentral software. When streaming with RECentral my CPU usage is around 10% when I'm streaming with OBS it's around 35%. This is a completely uneducated guess, but is OBS re-encoding the video from the Avermedia card? My understanding is that the Live Gamer already encodes the video in a twitch friendly format. I can understand why it would need to do that if I have multiple sources in my scene, but in this case it's the only source.

 

[Muf]

It is possible for applications to send video data back to the AVerMedia card for hardware compression, but it seems the API is not publicly available and so far only RECentral and XSplit support the functionality. That said, the quality of AVerMedia's hardware encoding chip leaves much to be desired and I've heard that to get the same quality using hardware encoding, you need a bitrate several times what you would need when encoding with x264.

 

[Lain]

when you stream with recentral, it uses the built-in h264 encoder on the card I believe. so it will probably use less CPU through that.

 

[Philodox]

Ok, thanks for the replies.

 

[R1CH]

Have to agree with Muf, the hw encoder on this card is really sub-par compared to x264. Even at 10mbps, x264 at 2mbps was generating better quality.