Question / Help Which hardware solution can give me back my frames per second?

[Light And Magic]

I am streaming to Twitch from a 2010 Mac Pro. The performance hit, even after upgrading to a GTX 680 video card, is massive, which I notice in very low FPS in many games.

I wonder which hardware solution I could use in or next to my Mac Pro that works fine with OBS Multiplatform and gives me back my FPS.

I want to stream mostly from the Mac itself but also would love to include XBox One streams going through the same setup.

 

[dodgepong]

If you want no performance impact, stream from a different computer than the one you're playing on and capture it with a capture card.

You can post your log here and we can see if there's anything that can be improved with it.

 

[Light And Magic]

Although using a second computer could work for some, in my case I find it very hard to work out this option. I use not only a game and OBS, but also a multitude of helper applications (some written by myself) to compose what is being shown on stream. I also do some nice audio routings which would be hard to maintain when streaming on a second computer.

So I am still looking for an all-in-one solution and would not mind buying a hardware device that gets the load off my cpu and gpu while keeping everything under my central control so to speak.

 

[dodgepong]

You can still do that with OBS. Just run OBS on the game computer, but don't stream, and use the projector mode to output the video to a second "monitor", which feeds into the capture card of another computer.

I don't know of any dedicated hardware encoding devices you can just buy off the shelf, and even if there was, you would probably have to do what I just described for it anyway.

Th other alternatives are QuickSync, NVENC, or VCE, but OBS does not support those yet. Also, I don't know what the status is on Mac support for those GPU-based hardware encoders.

Like I said, you can try posting your log and perhaps we can identify things that can be improved in your settings to increase performance.

 

[Light And Magic]

Running OBS on my main computer without streaming breaks my performance in a very hard way, the streaming itself adds only very little to that. So OBS's handling of the various inputs is using most of my systems' resources while streaming is not hard at all for my machine. I want to find the particular part that OBS is working so hard on and trying to offload that to different hardware.

 

[dodgepong]

This is why I keep asking you to post your log, because it kind of sounds like you might be using Window capture, which hurts performance and is not recommended.

And if you're not, it can help identify what is going wrong.

If OBS is impacting your performance just by being open and without encoding, then either you have a slow source in your scene that is hard for OBS to render, or your GPU is really weak and OBS can't render on it fast enough. If the latter is the case, then the "hardware" that you need to get to help you would be a new GPU.

 

[Light And Magic]

Tonight I threw away all global sources and scenes in OBS and started from scratch, recreating an EVE Online scene.

I managed to keep close to 60 frames per second (down from an original 150-ish) by using Game Capture and not too much stuff on-screen at the same time. I tested against Display Capture and Game Capture was almost as fast. Window Capture (which I actually never used in my scenes) was indeed way slower and made my FPS drop to about 35.

Using 3 audio sources also costs about 10 FPS on my system, but I need them to manage music, game and voice seperately.

I changed GPU by replacing my 5770 1 GB with the GTX 680 4 GB and this helped a lot. I wanted to buy the GTX 980 but can not justify the price :(

I will do more test runs and will try all kinds of settings to push the best out of OBS on my Mac. If I have surprising results I will show the log files in this topic so you can help figure out what could be done better.