Question / Help OBS questions

[Scottward]

Hi,
I'm somewhat new to streaming in terms of streaming for myself. I have a low internet speed, and in the classic OBS there were network things I could use to help the load on games I played that were online multiplayer that kept my ping to the servers at around 70 (which is what it was without streaming). I tried OBS Studio and my ping was at 410+ with the same settings in terms of bitrate and everything else. Also, I only have one filter in my video settings tab which is bilinear, and I don't know if that's just because of using the old version of OBS or not.

I'm not sure what to do because I enjoy streaming, but I can't use OBS Studio which has more features available without my connection REALLY suffering. Another thing with OBS Studio is that because I'm on Windows 7, I don't have access to NVENC, at least to my understanding. Is that true? I have no plans to upgrade to Windows 10 anytime soon, as I do not like it. This is sort of lower on the priority list if I can't even stream with a decent ping to begin with.

Thank you for your time.

 

[FerretBomb]

Classic still works, and has a number of features that are still missing from Studio. There's no need to upgrade just yet unless you're using some of the new Studio stuff (HDPVR2 support, multi-adapter compatibility).

NVENC works fine under Win7 on Classic, assuming your GPU supports it. I'm not sure Studio has hardware acceleration yet (it doesn't show up on my system when I try to select the encoder); one of many missing features still to be implemented, I guess.

 

[Scottward]

Classic still works, and has a number of features that are still missing from Studio. There's no need to upgrade just yet unless you're using some of the new Studio stuff (HDPVR2 support, multi-adapter compatibility).

NVENC works fine under Win7 on Classic, assuming your GPU supports it. I'm not sure Studio has hardware acceleration yet (it doesn't show up on my system when I try to select the encoder); one of many missing features still to be implemented, I guess.

Thanks for the info. I will stick to classic for now. I do enjoy it, I like some of the features from Studio but honestly I can live without them, I just want to be able to stream at an okay quality without a huge strain on the connection to the server.

I do have another question, for you or anyone that may be able to answer it: instead of downscaling the resolution within OBS, would it look better if I just ran the game at a lower resolution and had OBS use that resolution instead? I'm not quite sure how it works, and I've read a few things that said downscaling will make it more grainy, but I could be mistaken. Also, is the filters (lanczos, bicubic) only in Studio? I only seem to have bilinear, which is fine, I was just curious as others said that the other filters look better.

Thank you again for the reply, much appreciated.

 

[FerretBomb]

For best quality, you need to play the game at, and have all of your art assets sized properly for the resolution you're streaming at, so you use zero downscale. Any rescaling will cause a quality loss, and it's mostly there so you can enjoy the game at full or native monitor resolution while being able to stream at a lower bitrate and cpu appropriate resolution. The specific downscaling method is mostly personal-preference, with each type theoretically working better for certain types of games. Both Classic and Studio should have all three types of downscaler available.

 

[Scottward]

For best quality, you need to play the game at, and have all of your art assets sized properly for the resolution you're streaming at, so you use zero downscale. Any rescaling will cause a quality loss, and it's mostly there so you can enjoy the game at full or native monitor resolution while being able to stream at a lower bitrate and cpu appropriate resolution. The specific downscaling method is mostly personal-preference, with each type theoretically working better for certain types of games. Both Classic and Studio should have all three types of downscaler available.

Okay, that's what I thought. Thank you so much for explaining it to me. Most the games I play I don't mind a little quality loss while playing, I just want my stream to at least be watchable.