AMD or intel for broadcasting Xbox One

theRichieJ

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Aug 18, 2015
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I am not very familiar with AMD, but I was looking at the i7 4790. What role does the GPU have in streaming?
This is my first time building a PC.
Thanks for your help!
 
Are you looking to stream to an Xbox One or stream from an Xbox? If you are looking to stream from an Xbox, an AMD A10 APU or Intel Core i3 will be more than enough, since the GPU is not as important as the VCE parts (which are in GPUs, but hardly change from the weakest to best).

If you are looking to stream to an Xbox (not yet available) or Shield, then you'll need a beefy GPU to do the graphics rendering (though encoding is not an issue).

If you are looking to capture video from an Xbox using an HDMI capture card, you might need a good CPU depending on the software and quality settings, but again the GPU isn't as important.
 

theRichieJ

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Aug 18, 2015
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Thanks for the reply! I am using a capture card to get my gameplay onto a pc, then applying a webcam box and pushing it to twitch. I will also be editing videos on the PC, nothing too crazy, just for youtube. Does that affect that solution you gave me?
 


That depends entirely on your software and how it renders out everything. If you are going to be doing editing, a faster CPU is generally a good thing.

From what I've seen, most of the cheaper (free) twitch broadcaster programs support QuickSync and NVENC, so Intel is definitely the cheapest way to go. QuickSync reduces video quality a tiny bit, but reduces CPU use for encoding by a massive amount. Perhaps one of the mid-level Core i5 haswell chips (i5 4440/4460, i5 45XX or i5 46XX) by itself would be enough. Just remember to avoid Xeon chips and AMD since those don't have supported video encoders.

You can always add an Nvidia graphics card (950/960) later if you need extra power for editing (most editing software nowadays comes with OpenCL or CUDA for certain functions), but that can wait usually.

Also, if your twitch broadcaster program supports AMD VCE, AMD GPUs are also a viable option, including APU chips like the A10-7850. Fewer programs support VCE than QuickSync though, so I would still recommend Intel for low budget realtime encoding rigs.