This actually made a HUGE difference! I'm almost up to the quality of my Afterburner recordings now (minus the compression). Is there anything else I could do in order to boost the performance? Since I have GPU muscle to spare, do you think that downscaling the image will allow for more bitrate headroom and perhaps better FPS? I'm still not quite getting a solid thirty, but it's pretty close. Also, what exactly does "use CFR" do to make this much of a change?

Cyro

United Kingdom20295 Posts

June 24 2014 18:06 GMT

#1945

If you mean downscale as in stream at a lower resolution, you can always do that and trade off losing resolution for gaining higher "quality"

if you mean downscale as in run game at like 2880x1620 scaled to 1920x1080, you could do that but it wouldn't improve much, only the image going into the encoder

KingofGods

Canada1218 Posts

July 07 2014 20:32 GMT

#1946

How do streamers get the scenes to switch when they alt tab out of the game?

Zess

Adun Toridas!9144 Posts

July 07 2014 21:11 GMT

#1947

On July 08 2014 05:32 KingofGods wrote:
How do streamers get the scenes to switch when they alt tab out of the game?

There's a Simple Scene Switcher plugin for OBS that does automated scene switches based on detected active windows

There's another plugin specifically for SC2 that detects a registry key for in game/out of game

Another way is to make scene hotkeys and have fast fingers

Hyren

United States817 Posts

July 08 2014 05:58 GMT

#1948

Streaming on a 1920x1080 monitor, i3 4350 cpu, xfx r9 270 graphics card. Tried streaming Dead Space today, lowered my resolution to 1600x900 and "DeadSpace.exe has stopped working" popped up and my computer froze. I could tab around but couldn't click anything to quit the program. edit: This only happens when I'm streaming.

Stream Settings: http://imgur.com/a/qBnXp#4

Cyro

United Kingdom20295 Posts

July 08 2014 07:17 GMT

#1949

On July 08 2014 14:58 Hyren wrote:
Streaming on a 1920x1080 monitor, i3 4350 cpu, xfx r9 270 graphics card. Tried streaming Dead Space today, lowered my resolution to 1600x900 and "DeadSpace.exe has stopped working" popped up and my computer froze. I could tab around but couldn't click anything to quit the program. edit: This only happens when I'm streaming.

Stream Settings: http://imgur.com/a/qBnXp#4

When that happens, it's usually (in my experience) because the game doesn't like the capture method. You could try running it in windowed fullscreen and using monitor/window capture (i dunno what's best) instead of using game capture

Hyren

United States817 Posts

July 08 2014 07:33 GMT

#1950

Capturing the window does seem to solve the problem, thanks!

KingofGods

Canada1218 Posts

July 10 2014 06:47 GMT

#1951

Here is my "new" upgraded system, what would be the best SC2 and OBS settings to maximize the experience for stream viewers?

AMD FX-8350 Black Edition Vishera 8-Core 4.0GHz (4.2GHz Turbo) Socket AM3+ 125W Desktop Processor FD8350FRHKBOX

BIOSTAR A960D+ AM3+ AMD 760G + SB710 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard

G.SKILL NS 10GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600)

SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 5670 1GB GDDR5

Download: 25-50MBpS

Upload: 10MBpS

Windows 7, 64 bit.

Cyro

United Kingdom20295 Posts

July 10 2014 13:17 GMT

#1952

On July 10 2014 15:47 KingofGods wrote:
Here is my "new" upgraded system, what would be the best SC2 and OBS settings to maximize the experience for stream viewers?

AMD FX-8350 Black Edition Vishera 8-Core 4.0GHz (4.2GHz Turbo) Socket AM3+ 125W Desktop Processor FD8350FRHKBOX

BIOSTAR A960D+ AM3+ AMD 760G + SB710 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard

G.SKILL NS 10GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600)

SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 5670 1GB GDDR5

Download: 25-50MBpS

Upload: 10MBpS

Windows 7, 64 bit.

something like 1080p30, veryfast, ~2000-3500kbit bitrate

fx8350 at stock isn't very good for sc2

[image loading]

KingofGods

Canada1218 Posts

July 10 2014 14:42 GMT

#1953

Ultra game settings? I'm not sure how to read those numbers.

Cyro

United Kingdom20295 Posts

July 10 2014 15:38 GMT

#1954

Yea, Ultra. It doesn't really matter what graphics settings are used because it's extremely CPU bound

is just saying fx@4700mhz has 36.1fps average in that test. Haswell@4700mhz had 62.9 (so ~82% faster at the same clock speed in sc2)

KingofGods

Canada1218 Posts

July 10 2014 15:50 GMT

#1955

Oh, ok. The standard in video streaming is 30fps anyway isn't it?

Cyro

United Kingdom20295 Posts

July 10 2014 17:24 GMT

#1956

30, 60, whatever people feel like

just meaning to say that in a big battle where any CPU has bad performance in sc2, fx at stock (4200mhz turbo) would run at half of the FPS of a 4690k. That might be 100fps on FX vs 200 on i5, or 10fps on fx vs 20 on i5

y0su

Finland7871 Posts

July 10 2014 18:16 GMT

#1957

On July 11 2014 02:24 Cyro wrote:
30, 60, whatever people feel like

just meaning to say that in a big battle where any CPU has bad performance in sc2, fx at stock (4200mhz turbo) would run at half of the FPS of a 4690k. That might be 100fps on FX vs 200 on i5, or 10fps on fx vs 20 on i5

So wouldn't lowering his broadcast resolution and/or fps make a difference? (Or am I mistaken about the resources needed to stream?)

Cyro

United Kingdom20295 Posts

July 10 2014 18:34 GMT

#1958

On July 11 2014 03:16 y0su wrote:

Show nested quote +

So wouldn't lowering his broadcast resolution and/or fps make a difference? (Or am I mistaken about the resources needed to stream?)

No, it wouldn't change performance

Broadcast stuff can only hurt performance. If FX runs starcraft 2 at 20fps while i5 is at 35fps, then nothing you do in OBS will change that or make it better. Running OBS would hurt performance the same on both CPU's

Just wanted to say it's generally a bad idea to use FX for streaming sc2 if you want the game to run well

y0su

Finland7871 Posts

July 10 2014 19:33 GMT

#1959

On July 11 2014 03:34 Cyro wrote:

Show nested quote +

No, it wouldn't change performance

Broadcast stuff can only hurt performance. If FX runs starcraft 2 at 20fps while i5 is at 35fps, then nothing you do in OBS will change that or make it better. Running OBS would hurt performance the same on both CPU's

Just wanted to say it's generally a bad idea to use FX for streaming sc2 if you want the game to run well

He already has an FX... Let's focus on optimizing that.

Are you saying that regardless of FPS/resolution the (CPU) resources needed to stream do not change? (If that's the case I need to change to 1080p@60...)

Ropid

Germany3557 Posts

July 10 2014 20:05 GMT

#1960

On July 11 2014 04:33 y0su wrote:

Show nested quote +

He already has a FX... Let's focus on optimizing that.

Are you saying that regardless of FPS/resolution the resources needed to stream do not change? (If that's the case I need to change to 1080p@60...)

The way I understood it, when OBS is capturing frames, it blocks any processing on the GPU for each frame for a split second. This block happens while the picture gets transferred over the PCI-E bus to the CPU and saved into main memory. The time needed is perhaps a fixed amount per frame and there's nothing you can do about it. There's a certain percentage you will lose in the game's FPS.

The resolution stuff you configure is about the video compression. When those numbers come into play, the GPU is already done with capturing and the game's performance isn't touched any more, it's only about the processing in OBS and the video compression at that point. The video compression runs separate from the game, and the FX-8350 has eight cores! It has more resources to run things in parallel compared to an i5.