Seeking advice about my streaming setup

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Lazarus_Long

New Member
I am very new to streaming and do not know a lot about the technology involved. I have my gaming PC that I am currently streaming from with OBS Studio but I would like to offload the streaming to a second PC if possible.

My Desktop/Gaming System:
AMD Ryzen 7 3700X CPU, 32GB DDR4 RAM, Nvidia RTX2070 GPU, a single SATA 3 SSD for data, a single NVMe SSD for OS (Ubuntu 20.04) and games.

System I would like to handle streaming video and audio to Twitch:
AMD Ryzen 9 3950 CPU, 64GB DDR4 RAM, Nvidia GTX 750 GPU, dual NVMe SDD's, 4x 4TB 7200 RPM drives (RAID10), also running Ubuntu 20.04

These two system are connected via 10Gbps Ethernet and the second system hosts iSCSI targets for the rest of my homebrew SAN.

I wish to reduce the overhead on my gaming PC. Is there a simple way to use OBS Studio on my second system to capture the video and audio from my Desktop/Gaming system and steam it to twitch from there? I had thought of somehow writing data to an NFS share mounted on my Gaming system and feeding it to OBS Studio. I have no idea how to go about that though and even it did work I would full up the disk sooner or later unless I could somehow only write and read the current state of my game and mic input.

I would appreciate any advice you could give because running OBS Studio on the gaming PC sometimes means a significant performance drop while playing (e.g. when using WINE or Steam Play to run a game). If using OBS Studio would not be the best way to achieve this what other software should I look into?
 
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Lawrence_SoCal

Active Member
not my area of expertise (I'm not a gamer, just from readings posts over last 10+ months), but to get you started

Video output of gaming PC would typically be via NDI or using HDMI out (then a capture card).. not sure if Linux has another (better) option

AMD Ryzen 9 3950 CPU, - heck of a monster CPU
Nvidia GTX 750 GPU - uh, old, not so good? is you plan to use CPU encoding?
Not being a gamer, I could be way off base, but I much prefer a single physical PC (hence using VMs from 15+ years ago), I'd be curious if
- combining the newer CPU and extra RAM, the RTX2070 into a single system would work
The RTX 2070 would have the better NVENC so you could use GPU encoding offload
With the 3950 and 64GB of ram, you could run a couple VMs simultaneously assuming somewhat rational workloads.
If you have other reason to leave the 2 PC setup, and the idea of using NVENC is okay with you, I'd seriously consider upgrading the OBS PC to a GTX 1650 Super (Turing) or higher for its better GPU encode offload (though for a little more I'd get the RTX2060 being released tomorrow if you can get your hands on one for a reasonable price ;^)

as for OBS settings.... depends on your specific settings/use case as to how much load it creates on a system
Per the pinned post in this forum ]
As for a recommendation, the NVENC is a separate section of the GPU, typically not used during gaming, so if you accept its quality, offloading real-time video encoding to it should really minimize system performance impact
And then avoid using some of the fancy effects/filters, etc that are CPU intensive (wouldn't matter if OBS or other, the processing impact is of what you are trying to do.. other software isn't going to make much, if any difference, or possibly even be worse)
 
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