OBS @ 4K

[ba55meister]

I want to set up a YouTube streaming channel that will potentially stream in 4K. For starters the aim is 1080p (ideally 60fps) and then an upgrade to 4K.
Most of the stuff would ne a raw video source and a bunch of "Browser" type source layers on top.

what do you think or suggest the minimum system requirements I'd need to run the show? I looked at Raspberry pi to see if I can start using it to get a 1080p30 going but there seems to be an issue with having a Browser source on the raspberry Pi linux build of OBS.

Do I need a machine with NVIDIA card to help things of are there other configurations that I could look at?

 

[koala]

It seems you don't have any experience with streaming yet. I suggest you use your current PC/laptop and do some test streaming to get used to it. From the behavior of your current hardware, judge if you need a more powerful machine and how much more powerful it needs to be and what components need to be different.
A Nvidia card for nvenc hardware encoding 4k would help tremendously if you don't aim for a high-end CPU. OBS compositing for 4k is impossible with any built in iGPU, and AMD GPUs don't have a decent hardware encoder, so you need a very powerful CPU if you intend to encode 4k if you choose a AMD GPU.

 

[ba55meister]

Thanks for replies. I do have some experience with OBS, just thinking about getting a dedicated machine (ideally smth small). The reason behind 4K is that I want to see if there is something decent out there now which isn't too pricey so i dont have to upgrade the whole thing later when I decide to move from 1080p to 4K.

So looks like having a decent NVIDIA GPU will help greatly going forward, thanks,

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

So looks like having a decent NVIDIA GPU will help greatly going forward, thanks,

One thing to consider is whether you only want to livestream (so real-time video encoding), or if you plan to record locally, edit, then upload. Those are similar but different workloads. For example, with video editing instead of livestreaming, a number of video editors have their own encoding engine to take advantage of AMD GPUs. But today, for livestreaming, NVENC is the way to get good video results and reducing CPU utilization by doing GPU encode offload

Others know far more than I, but after hanging on in these forums for over a year now, I can tell you that a general recommendation is to use a "Turing" based nVidia card, and the resulting NVENC (encode offload engine) is much better than in prior generations. This used to mean a nVidia GTX 1650 Super (not original 1650) or higher/better. There has been comments that 'some' recently made GTX 1650 GPU might be Turing based... your mileage may vary. Unfortunately, due to shortages, all of these GPUs are high priced at the moment. Last year I bought a PC for 1080p stream/recording work today, that I wanted to be able to handle (hopefully) 4K in the future in case that ever came about. I'd have preferred an AMD Ryzen CPU, but in a Tier 1 business class system with next day onsite service, I was stuck with Intel. so be it. I went 8core/16thread, 16GB RAM, and a GTX 1660 Super. That system is complete overkill for 1080p work today with my CPU and GPU utilization in the 20% range while livestreaming.