Question / Help Video looks higher quality streaming than recording? Am I going mad?

[AmazingSully]

I've recently decided to record some gameplay videos with OBS for uploading to Youtube, and I've been trying to get the settings just right. When I try to record the video quality is extremely grainy, and yet when I stream it's not. I've decided to record at 720p x 60fps, and while I normally stream at 720p x 30fps, I've quadrupled my bitrate from 2500 while streaming to 10000 while recording, and yet the quality still seems worse when recording. I also noticed that I don't really see any quality improvement when recording from 720p to 1080p.

So why would the quality look better streaming than recording?

I've tried CBR and VBR, tried GPU and CPU encoding, fiddled with as many settings as I can think might have an issue, but really the only way to get decent quality is to jump the bitrate to about 30000 which makes file sizes a bit too large to deal with reasonably.

Log: https://obsproject.com/logs/Q80ZK_2NJ2gL_qHo

 

[Harold]

Settings - output
Output mode: Simple
Recording Quality: Indistinguishable
Recording Format: FLV
Recording encoder: nvenc or software (X264, low cpu usage preset, increased file size)

 

[AmazingSully]

Settings - output
Output mode: Simple
Recording Quality: Indistinguishable
Recording Format: FLV
Recording encoder: nvenc or software (X264, low cpu usage preset, increased file size)

If a bitrate of 30000 generates files too large to deal with, won't this be monumentally worse?