OBS performance on macOS Mojave on Macbook Pro 2011

[illusRingGate]

System Info:
OBS 26.0.2
Macbook Pro Late 2011
2.2 GHz Intel Core i7
4GB 1333MHz DDR3
Intel HD Graphics 3000
AMD Radeon HD 6750M
240GB Kingston SSD

Hello. With support for High Sierra ending soon, I'm thinking of upgrading to macOS Mojave using dosdude1's Mojave Patcher Tool for Unsupported Macs. My question is it worth the upgrade in terms of performance when livestreaming using OBS? I'll have to disable the AMD GPU 'cause of the transition to Apple's Metal graphics API. Does anyone know if OBS's performance under Metal is worse or not, especially on older hardware? Although, OBS performs okay on High Sierra, it has some issues like encoding overload when bitrate is too high (3000+ kbps @720p) or I can't use any slower preset than Very Fast. I'm hoping Mojave has better performance with OBS. Any advice is appreciated.

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

I'm not a mac user, so can't comment on OS and OBS performance
However, I tried to stream a non-optimized using a decent Gaming laptop from 5 years ago and failed miserably. That hardware (and Intel CPU) weren't up to the demanding task that is video encoding. Having an old CPU, (and without knowing any better), I suspect you are currently using GPU offload, and if you lose that? Your encoding overload is only likely to get (a lot?) worse. You don't mention exact specs, but I'm guessing that is the 32nm Sandy Bridge 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7 processor (2720QM), right? On laptops, Intel has released 11th generation CPUs (the 2xxxQM indicates a 2nd generation CPU). As such, I imagine you are using a pretty simple OBS configuration, optimize as you mentioned for low hardware resource demands. The challenge of a typical Operating System, is that it is designed for a certain resource level. If you are fooling the OS to get it to install, expect to spend time optimizing is to lower default utilization (some driven by the new features).
So good luck, but probably time for a new machine. With that said, my primary desktop is an even older CPU (by 2 generations) but with HDDs replaced by SSDS, and lots of RAM, but it can handle multiple VMs at same time, and most everything except upper-end photo/video editing tasks just fine. So I'm certainly not one to push for latest and greatest. But video capture/encoding is hard work. So hard, that even though AV1 is likely to replace H.264 (H2.65 being a licensing mess so basically skipped) there is no consumer/end-user encoders because it is that demanding (the faster consumer CPUs and GPUs are powerful enough) ... just a point of reference. That OBS and similar software pulls off what it does with H.264 is pretty amazing, but at some point you need to prepare yourself for the need to get a new machine

again, not a MacOS user, so hopefully you'll get a better answer than mine.

 

[illusRingGate]

The macbook pro that I use for streaming is not my primary computer, I have high-end desktop pc but I can't use it for streaming in other locations. So I'm forced to use my macbook which I can't afford to replace. So as I understand it I shall stay with High Sierra? The thing is that even though I'm streaming at 2500kbps @720p x264 very fast, OBS cpu usage is only at 25-30%. Doesn't that mean that there is margin for more performance?

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

On Windows, within OBS it shows what the OBS process is using of the CPU. It does NOT show how busy overall the CPU is (nor other hardware resources). So on Windows, the OBS CPU indicator could be 30%, but CPU overall (all processes) at 90+% and no there isn't any headroom. Again, I'm not a mac user, and can't answer your specific question. I'm just pointing out that while it might work, you are definitely fighting an uphill battle. Good luck.
My question to you is - do you have the ability do the upgrade, and back out (return to current state) if it doesn't work?
Hopefully a mac user will give you a better answer than my educated guessing

 

[TarantulasDreamTV]

I have been streaming on a 2011 Macbook Pro running High Sierra and maxed out internals since roughly June of this year - my experience has been okay to not great. Running OBS with a few sources (camera, a few overlays/graphics, some video) and a handful of scenes/transitions, my Macbook hits roughly 95C with fans fully on for the duration of the stream (roughly an hour); transitions skip frames on occasion as well. I honestly wouldn't recommend it for gaming obviously, and unless you're planning on keeping your sources to a minimum, I would recommend against using it entirely.