Optimization Quality Vs. Latency

[millionandbell]

Hello, I have a few questions. My setup seems to work very well on the Quality side of things. I would say everything looks good and runs pretty good. One issue I have been noticing though is that there is a relatively hefty Latency issue. Sometimes it takes up to 20 seconds before I see someone's chats, while I can go into other streams and see my chat on their screen instantly. Another thing I noticed is that some streams I can watch with no lag while others it just buffers. I have low latency mode enabled on twitch and everywhere I can find it. I am at work currently with this on my mind, so when I get home later in the day I can post a log file with all my settings. I have a GTX 970 (curse you graphics card shortage) and an i9 10850k processor, bottleneck I know lol

 

[koala]

The quality/latency settings in the encoder setup deals with milliseconds. They control if the latency between source and encoded frames is zero frames, one frame, or a few frames (less than 10). This is not relevant for your streaming. These settings are important for cloud gaming services like Geforce Now, where it is important that a fast shooter has zero latency.

The multi second latency of your stream is from the rtmp protocol and depends on the streaming service, on the bitrate, and on the buffering. The larger the buffer size, the higher the latency. Some streaming services offer a low latency setting. This reduces the buffer size.
The downside of smaller buffer size is with unreliable bandwidth/throughput of your internet connection and the internet connection of your viewers. The smaller the buffer size, the more the viewers will have stalls and buffering if your internet connection is not reliable enough, or if the streaming service internet connection gets near overload.