Streaming causes frame stutter in-game -- even through a capture card - Hardware & Software

Running a GTX 1070 and an Intel i5-3450 I was playing around with my stream settings in OBS Studio so that I can play games comfortably while streaming. My target is 720p@60fps, but I guess if this doesn't work out then 30fps will have to do. I'm using a capture card (if anyone's curious, it's an Elgato HD60) to capture my screen rather than the "game capture" source in OBS. In theory it seems like this would lighten the load on my computer, but in actuality the performance hit has been about the same in both cases. For example, certain performance-heavy games such as Overwatch and Tekken 7 would drop to around 50 frames (including some stuttering) while streaming my screen. Performance is completely fine if I'm streaming a still image. Similar results occurs on all of the different encoders. Streaming the capture card on a laptop instead is an option but is pretty inconvenient since my microphone and headphone setup is on my main machine. My conclusion so far is that there's a hardware bottleneck somewhere, but I'd appreciate some second opinions on the situation.

If you're focusing on streaming then a Ryzen 7 would be so much better for you. Although the i5 will be netting you decent performance actually playing the game, it cannot handle the extra workload. Ryzen has been great for streamers.

Even though you're using a HD60 to capture the video, OBS is still doing the encoding upon your own system. There is no way to offset the encoding hit produced by OBS other than changing your encoding settings or moving the encoding entirely off your gaming system. In this case offset it to a laptop as you can have the capture card output to the laptop and then do the encoding on that, I used to do this back when I was using a i5-2500k (moved to a Ryzen 1700 so don't have to bother with it anymore). Use the advantage of having the capture card, go full two system, as for audio you can have your mic and headset audio output to the capture card as well by either using Elgato's shitty softwaresuperior streaming software or VB Cable.

The onboard encoder only benefits you when using our Game Capture software for recording. In *****every***** other situation your system ultimately is doing the same work. With an HD60, it's doing it a second time in OBS. 720p60 on a 3450 aint gonna really work unless you're capturing console games. 😓

rekt

No offense Crest, but last time I used it was horrible to use, the UI is god awful and it had absolutely fuckall functionality, they were only just adding in overlay features to it by the time I sold my HD60. Also nevermind the fact the latest build never worked with the fucking thing out of the box, had to keep using an older version otherwise it wouldn't detect it and even then it was a coin flip if it'd detect it. This is also apparently a really fucking common problem since there were so many results that came back with the same issues I was getting. Don't take this wrong, but I'm never buying another external Elgato product after my previous experience with the HD and HD60, maybe the internal card is better but the externals can go fuck off for PC - PC streaming setups, it just doesn't ever want to play ball all the time which is a really fustrating factor, if it was only the odd time but it never was, these would constantly keep having issues detecting the card and this was both on my desktop and laptop (which both went through about 5 reinstalls over the lifetime of having both of the cards, still had the same issues).

It's not really for the reason you think, atleast for the external items. It's on USB 2.0. If the system were going to use the encoder, then the card would need to be able to capture 1080p60, compress it to something to fit in USB 2.0. Then the computer would receive that feed, decode it, add webcam/text/overlays. Then compress it again to be sent through USB 2.0 to the card which then would compress it to the specs needed and then send it back to the host machine to be stored to disk or streamed. So the chip would need to be able to encode two video streams and decode one. PCIe is another story which I'm not qualified to speak on. But external boxes use onboard encoders more so because they needed to fit it into a narrow bandwidth. USB 3.0 doesn't have that limit and allows for uncompressed video, hence low latency HD60 S. Why use an encoder when you're not limited by bandwidth and can send the entire video stream untouched and let the host machine handle it. GPUs for the last like 4-5 years can do 1080p60 encoding in their sleep, and more recent ones 4k60 without blinking. Reason it's the official software is we grab the precompressed stream and write it directly to disk. The software is not actually using the encoder, it's just taking what the encoder sends to it and doesn't touch it outside of decoding it for preview. The HD and HD60 are 24/7 encoding video whether you think it is or not. Sorry you had problems with the cards. Nothing I can do about that now.

A little idea, perhaps the issue can be resolved with two hard drives. One for gaming and the other for the recording software and record destination.