Optimal Streaming Settings For My Setup

Chthonian

Prominent
Feb 28, 2017
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510
So for a long time now since building my newest computer I've been struggling with getting a decent enough quality out of my live streams. I have looked over countless forums and other posts where people have asked the same questions I am wondering but I'm not really getting anywhere. I used to stream using a pretty bad PC and even worst internet and I somehow back then got not so terrible looking quality out of it, but since upgrading to my new PC and slightly better internet I seem to not be able to get a quality I'm happy with. This is my new PC specs:

Motherboard: MSI B350 Gaming Pro Carbon
Graphics Card: ASUS ROG Strix GTX 1060 6 GB
Memory: 16 Gb of G. Skill Ripjaws V Series DDR4 3200
Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 1600 6-Core @ 3.5 GHz

My old PC was a old i3 paired with a Radeon R7 360 and I want to note my internet at the time of streaming with my old rig was terrible, I used a video bitrate of 550

Since getting my new PC we have also upgraded to the best internet package I can get in my area and I am now able to stream at 1500-1600 video bitrate which is still low I know, but is far better then what I used to have. Now I would think that since getting the better upload speed and having a far better CPU I should be able to get much better quality out of my streams but I still get a lot of pixelation. I've tried everything from down scaling to 540p to 480p but all that does is make my stream look blurry and hardly gets rid of pixelation. Some of the games I stream don't have as much high motion and I can get away with streaming them at 720p no problem but I still get some pixelation here and there. Most of the games I play are first person and thats mainly what I'm trying to get my stream looking better for. I have also tried switching the CPU Profile setting in OBS to a slower one which my CPU can handle no problem but it seems to only slightly help. I'm at my wits end trying to figure this out and any help/advice on the matter would be amazing as I think I may just be stuck with what quality I'm getting unless I get higher upload speed.

Currently I'm streaming at 720p with 1500 video bitrate, 128 Audio bitrate, CPU Usage set to medium, 30 FPS and am using the Lanczos Downscale Filter in OBS.
 
Solution
With a bitrate that low you will get pixelation no matter what, but your settings seem fine - i used to have quite similar settings when I had slow internet. In my experience, using 1080p (or higher) source material and downscaling it in OBS to 720p manages to get a somewhat acceptable image quality. Turning down your audio to 64 might also help, even tho the sound quality will decrease noticeably.
Also your streaming bitrate shold be a bit below your max. upload speed since audio and your game itself also use bandwith.

Recently I streamed using the Radeon ReLive software, which comes with my AMD GPU driver and it's honestly great for streaming. I'm sure Nvidia offers a counterpart for their GPUs (I think it's called "Geforce...

Kollosso

Honorable
Jan 20, 2015
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10,660
With a bitrate that low you will get pixelation no matter what, but your settings seem fine - i used to have quite similar settings when I had slow internet. In my experience, using 1080p (or higher) source material and downscaling it in OBS to 720p manages to get a somewhat acceptable image quality. Turning down your audio to 64 might also help, even tho the sound quality will decrease noticeably.
Also your streaming bitrate shold be a bit below your max. upload speed since audio and your game itself also use bandwith.

Recently I streamed using the Radeon ReLive software, which comes with my AMD GPU driver and it's honestly great for streaming. I'm sure Nvidia offers a counterpart for their GPUs (I think it's called "Geforce Experience Share". Using this software might increase Quality because of better configuration with your graphics card.

This is my stream using the AMD Driver @2K Video Bitrate: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/224922811
 
Solution