Question / Help Increasing quality of stream

[HuggableHedgehog]

Hi,
I've been trying to figure out how to increase the quality of videos or streams. I recently discovered using the hardware encoder (NVENC) performed so much better than the software encoder (x264). When using x264, my videos were so laggy and constantly just stopped for a few seconds. However, when I switched to the NVENC it removed all FPS lag and I am very excited. Now i'm trying to increase the quality that is recorded. When I record a video and choose Indistinguishable Quality, it records exactly how I would like. However, there is an option for same as stream, and that one is quite blocky visually, but still performs well. How would I go about fixing the stream one? Are there settings I can mess with or is it more of a hardware issue. Thanks for any help.

OBS Settings (Streaming):
- Video Bitrate: 2000
- Encoder: Hardware (NVENC)
- Audio Bitrate: 160
- Base Resolution: 1920x1080
- Output Resolution: 1920x1080
- Downscale Filter: Bicubic (sharpened scaling, 16 samples)
- Common FPS Values: 60

Hardware:
- Processor: i5-4690K CPU @ 3.50GHz
- RAM: 16.0 GB
- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970
- Motherboard: Z97 Pro

 

[Dilaz]

Set output resolution to 720p and fps to 30. Then increase the bitrate if you can or lower the resolution if you still want better quality.

 

[wallrik]

The recording setting "Indistinguishable Quality", while it technically can, it really should not be used for streaming. It uses a mode called CRF (Constant Rate Factor) to set a constant quality which makes the bitrate fluctuate a lot. It also requires a lot to make 1080p60 look that good.

You should only ever use CBR for streaming, and if you really want to keep 1080p60 you need to max out Twitch's highest allowed bitrate at 6000. But I would advise against it. If you want to keep 2000 you should take the advice of @Dilaz

Read here what Twitch says about CBR:
https://help.twitch.tv/customer/portal/articles/1253460#ANoteonCBR

 

[HuggableHedgehog]

thanks a ton @Dilaz , it really helped. Don't know why I didn't think of dropping the FPS counter, makes the image clearer.