Question / Help Skipping frames

T

tehguy

Member
It seems my CPU is having a lot of trouble encoding at 1080p60

I am playing BF4 and streaming to Twitch, originally I just ran OBS on my gaming PC and used game capture, with my CPU (i7 4770k) I could happily stream 720p60 at 3500kbps with no impact on the game performance whatsoever. I wanted to go up to 1080p60 though, and it was seriously impacting the game, so I decided to move OBS onto another machine I have. It is not as powerful, but it does NOTHING except run OBS. I am using the Avermedia Extremecapture U3. The stream machine has a first generation i7 860 and 4GB RAM. Like I say though, it is skipping 25% of frames when trying to encode the video. Is this CPU massively underpowered for such a task? I thought it would be able to handle it. I watch the CPU usage when it is encoding and it floats around 75% on all 8 threads, never exceeding 80% so it's not maxing out.

PS. I changed encoding preset to superfast and it can keep up without skipping frames, but the quality is horrible, so I must use veryfast at minimum. If I were to slap a watercooler on and overclock it a bit, would it be sufficient?
 
Yes, that CPU is massively underpowered for 1080p60fps. Honestly, I can't recommend 1080p60fps especially for a FPS like BF4. The encoding/bitrate requirements for any sort of quality are pretty insane, so you'll have viewers that won't be able to watch due to stream lag. Plus, Flash can't really display 1080p60fps properly without stuttering/having awful frame timings.

You really should just stick to 720p60fps.
 
I understand. There's at least one BF4 streamer who is doing 1080p60, the capture card he uses is alone worth 5 times as much as my whole streaming PC. His has dual Xeons, and is significantly more powerful than his gaming machine. I thought that 1080p60 would only need about twice as much processing power as 720p60 since the resolution is doubled, but the processing power required seems to go up exponentially with resolution.

Bitrate isn't really a problem for me, I have 12Mbps upload so I can happily stream at 6000Kbps (I know Twitch don't like people using more than 3500, but my stream doesn't exactly get thousands of viewers). I guess I will stick to 720p60 for now then.
 
Yeah, if you're talking about widgitybear his 1080p60fps stream is actually a huge mess from a technical standpoint. There are many many reasons why 1080p60fps livestreams are completely inadvisable with current streaming tech.

1080p60fps is more than twice the jump from 720p60fps from an encoding standpoint. It's vastly more data to throw around.
 
His frame timings are a disaster. Take a look at it with R1CH's Twitch Analyzer sometime when he's streaming and look at the frame rate graph. It's all over the map. Not to mention he usually streams at a very high bit rate, which Twitch recommends against, and people who don't have powerful gaming computers can't even watch at 1080p60 due to how poorly Flash processes it.
 
Ah I see, although as a partner his streams always have the quality options so if you can't handle source then you can just go lower surely? Alas, my phone can stream source without issue.
 
Your phone also doesn't use Flash to view the video, it views the video feed directly. And having quality options is nice, if you're lucky enough for it, but that doesn't excuse terrible frame times and viewers' frustrations trying to view at Source quality.
 
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