Running OBS on Google GCP Cloud VM with Tesla T4 GPU - it works!

kanopy

New Member
All

I've searched on this thread in the past and I still see people asking questions about running OBS on a cloud VM, with lots of people saying it's not supported and not possible.

I want to say, firstly this is not true. For 7 months now I've been running OBS quite happily on a large Google GCP VM and stream using it for 3 hours every Saturday as part of the WorldJam online music show (youtube.com/worldjam). It needs 16 vCPUs to run and and whilst streaming and recording it uses about 60% cpu. Now at the moment all it is doing is capture a zoom window, blending it with some audio from another bit of software and sometimes playing some media. When I wanted to use OBS Ninja to bring in some cameras and do some Chroma keying the VM could not sustain it. We've since moved to use one of the new NVIDIA built Google Cloud images that have a Tesla T4 GPU that supports NVENC. This has made a massive difference. I can now bring in 3 OBS Ninja cameras at cool quality, chroma key them, stream at 1920x1080 at a CBR bitrate of 6000 and record the stream and it uses less than 3% cpu across the 8 cores and the GPU is loaded around 25%.

I tried other cloud providers such as OVH and AWS, but their GPU VM instances do not support NVENC which OBS requires for hardware video encoding. This NVIDIA provided GCP image worked straight out of the box, although I did have to set some group policies to enable the GPU whilst using RDP, if anyone is interested in what I had to set to enable it and I can provide it in this thread.

Now this VM is NOT cheap, if you ran it constantly 24 x 7 it would cost you £600 per month. I run it for 3.5 hours every saturday so it will cost me £25 per month which I think is pretty reasonable. Also bear in mind not every of GCP's global data centres have these GPUs available on EU-WEST a and b have them in the UK.

The benefits for having this in a VM is that I can allow other people to do the streaming using the application account and it's fully backed up plus the network bandwidth from GCP's datacentre is amazing.

To install, go to your GCP console marketplace https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace and search for NVIDIA you will find a lot of pre-built images. I used the one labelled "NVIDIA Gaming PC - Windows Server 2019" but you can get them for Ubuntu or older version of Windows Server too.
 

kyromoto

New Member
Hi Kanopy,

yes, I am interested whoch settigs u did to make it working. I have something similar. Local Server (WIN S 2019) with Tesla T4 Card. I try local and RDP to start OBS with tesla support. But up to now no luck. if u could help and advise it would be very cool.
 
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