Lag and blurry stream with a Ryzen 9 5950X

[Elverias]

Hello there,

recently i tried to setup a stream with x264 but the stream is not fluent and by far not sharp.

I haven't tried lowering the resolution or bitrate (i've a 37MB upload), cause it's a high-end CPU. It should handle a simple stream easily. But i tired different presets (Slow/ medium/ fast) and switched between high and main profiles.

While reviewing the VOD, it seems to be smoother but still not that smooth as it should/ as i know from other streamer out there. And even in the VOD it's very blurry.

 

[FerretBomb]

1) You're downscaling. Not only that, you're using a non-full-integer downscale (1440p to 1080p) which will result in even worse quality.
2) You're streaming 1080p60 on 6000kbps. Standard-motion 1080p60 'wants' 12mbps, so you're giving it about half of what it wants.

I'd recommend dropping to 720p60. This is both a full-integer downscale, and should provide good image quality within the bitrate you're using. You could also stream at 1080p30 and be within that bitrate budget. 60fps is a nice-to-have luxury, but isn't necessary outside of retro-game streaming where sprite-blitting is used to fake transparency.

For maximum quality though, you would have to play your game at 1080p or whatever streaming resolution you intend to use. Downscaling will ALWAYS come with some degree of quality loss.

Past that, use the High profile and Slow preset, if your CPU can support it.

 

[Elverias]

Okay, i don't understand why downscaling reduces the quality dramatically but i guess i've to take it.

I tried now lots of things but i just can't bring it to reasonable result. 720@60 looks awful. Even reading texts is hard and gives me headache ( 720@60, 6000bitrate, high profile, slow preset). The best result i got was with 936@60, 6000, slow, main. But it's still to blurry to keep watching the stream for more then 15 minutes.

 

[hildegain]

Typically scaling the resolution down is hard when you've got to take data within say 2,3,4, or 8 blocks and squish it all down into 8.
Use something like Lanczos, make sure your base resolution is divisible by 2 (which usually results into a nice 4:1 pixel ratio) to get the one you want.

Also you can definitely achieve sharper visuals without having extreme bitrates but you're going to be fiddling with the settings for some time. Defaults are one-size fits all but doesn't do anything particularly well unless you throw enough bits at it.

You definitely want to use high profile, something slower than medium, and perhaps tweak some of the encoder settings like psy-RD (to maintain a sharper, albeit faker image), perhaps changing ipratio for better references, and make sure this setting is on in the encoder parameters "non-deterministic=1". Setting deblock=-1:-1 and using a sharpen filter (not too much, just a little) can also restore just a little sharpness to the image but ultimately you're always going to have a blurred image when you downscale. You've got to compensate for it.

 

[Elverias]

Typically scaling the resolution down is hard when you've got to take data within say 2,3,4, or 8 blocks and squish it all down into 8.
Use something like Lanczos, make sure your base resolution is divisible by 2 (which usually results into a nice 4:1 pixel ratio) to get the one you want.

Also you can definitely achieve sharper visuals without having extreme bitrates but you're going to be fiddling with the settings for some time. Defaults are one-size fits all but doesn't do anything particularly well unless you throw enough bits at it.

You definitely want to use high profile, something slower than medium, and perhaps tweak some of the encoder settings like psy-RD (to maintain a sharper, albeit faker image), perhaps changing ipratio for better references, and make sure this setting is on in the encoder parameters "non-deterministic=1". Setting deblock=-1:-1 and using a sharpen filter (not too much, just a little) can also restore just a little sharpness to the image but ultimately you're always going to have a blurred image when you downscale. You've got to compensate for it.

Thank you so much!
I'll give it a try the next days and gonna report here :)

 

[Elverias]

Sadly it didn't bring any improvement. I also tried set up everything to 1080 but thats not the problem here. Even on native 1080p the quality is very poor.

The 900p stream i'm currently watching has a better quality as everything i've tried to setup. I give up.

Thanks for the help everyone :)