Question / Help Six cores too slow for 720p?

[Dingo]

So, I definitely did my research before posting. I've tried many settings, and I just CANNOT seem to stream without huge fps drops in my games.

Mostly I play Enter the Gungeon on lowest graphics settings- runs buttery smooth 60fps when recording with Action!, but if I try to stream it with OBS at 720p 30fps instead, it runs like hot garbage. Even without webcam or audio, just the game capture downscaled to 720p is ruining my in-game fps, which I cannot understand.

I would also like to stream Dark Souls, but it just gets ruined as well. I honestly cannot tell what is ruining my machine performance so much, since it was a pretty beefy rig three or four years ago.

CPU: AMD Phenom II x6 1100T @ 3.3GHz (currently not OCd)
MB: MSI 890FXA-GD70
VGA: EVGA GTX 760 Superclocked 2GB GDDR5
(also have a Diamond 5970 collecting dust)
RAM: G.Skill Sniper DDR3 1866 4GB x4 (16GB)
OS: Win7 64bit

OBS settings:
Bitrate: 3500 (also tried lower bitrates)
Encoding: x264 (tried Nvidia NVENC as well, which works fine for recording on mirillis Action!)
Base resolution: monitor (1920 x 1080)
Resolution downscale: 1.5 (1280 x 720)
Filter: Bilinear
FPS: 25
Aero Disabled

Internet speeds: 74 Mbps down, 4.7 Mbps up

Is my stuff really that bad at encoding? Do I need to switch to a haswell i5 or i7 rig to stream single-machine? I see i7 4770K streamers running and streaming Dark Souls at 1080 60fps with no problems; surely there can't be that big of a performance gap for encoding? I'm also considering reformatting or installing Win10 to see what happens.

 

[Harold]

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Phenom+II+X6+1100T
Not a very powerful 6-core cpu.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-4770K+@+3.50GHz the 4770k in comparison.

 

[FerretBomb]

ENABLE Aero. It speeds up captures. Disabling it to improve performance is bad information from the Vista days that keeps hanging around.

Also, if someone is running 1080@60 on a 4770k, they're using Superfast or Ultrafast, and it's going to look like a hot mess. Even if they have the bitrate to actually do it (and most don't). Even a 4790k can't hit that mark without some significant strip-down and streamlining.

But yeah, AMD isn't the best when it comes to real-time video encoding.

 

[Boildown]

Streaming with OBS rule of thumb: Eight-core AMD or four-core Intel. Assuming not down-clocked mobile variants, game is reasonably optimized, sufficient GPU installed, streaming x264 720p30, etc etc.