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I have a 120Hz 1080p monitor (my video card struggles to pull this off as it is), so the inherent FPS drop while streaming is quite noticeable and irritating. Do you guys think my old PC would help if I used it as a dedicated streaming machine?
Current PC: i7-2600k @4.5GHz, GTX 560 (non-Ti), 8GB RAM
Old PC: Q6600 @3.0GHz, GTX 260 (<-- irrelevant but I'll include it anyway), 4GB RAM
Current OBS settings: 720p, 45 fps, Quality 10, 2000/2000 bitrate (~3.5mbps upload), 128kbps AAC, Very Fast preset
Benchmarks obviously favor the i7 by a huge margin (Pretty much 2:1 all around http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/53?vs=287 ). Will the Q6600 be able to handle the load, or will my stream quality suffer? Is it even worth getting a capture card and trying?
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In all the encoding-related benchmarks in the Anandtech comparison, the 2600K is at least twice as fast as the Q6600. And this is without overclocks. Your 2600K has a larger overclock-percentage than your Q6600, so that adds up even more.
SC2 only uses 2 CPU cores, the 2600K has 4 (+ hyperthreading). This means that SC2 will use at most half of the power of your CPU (in practice it'll be less than half) and since your main CPU is more than twice as powerful as your old one, the new CPU will still have more power left for streaming than the old one does.
So I would say that getting a capture card is a waste of money and you're better of lowering your stream quality if your ingame fps is insufficient for your needs.
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Doesn't capturing itself drop the FPS, even without any encoding on the CPU? It perhaps sucks up graphics card memory bandwidth from accessing the frame buffer or something, and is unavoidable. The 120 Hz screen makes FPS drops visible, which would not be seen at 60 Hz, and capturing with a second PC could still be worth it, as duplicating output to a second monitor is completely free regarding resources.
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Why dont you switch your cpu and gpu, start playing sc2 on Q6600 + GTX 560 and use the second machine to stream, with the i7 2600k & the gtx 260.
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On December 05 2012 18:33 Rannasha wrote:
So I would say that getting a capture card is a waste of money and you're better of lowering your stream quality if your ingame fps is insufficient for your needs.
The quality can't really be lowered any more than the current settings. I could set OBS to a lower framerate, but I don't think that would make a big enough difference (plus I just really like how 45fps streams look haha). The preset is set to Very Fast which is the least load I can put on my CPU without completely destroying quality 
On December 05 2012 19:08 Ropid wrote:
Doesn't capturing itself drop the FPS, even without any encoding on the CPU? It perhaps sucks up graphics card memory bandwidth from accessing the frame buffer or something, and is unavoidable. The 120 Hz screen makes FPS drops visible, which would not be seen at 60 Hz, and capturing with a second PC could still be worth it, as duplicating output to a second monitor is completely free regarding resources.
This is basically what I'm thinking. The Q6600 is obviously significantly weaker than the 2600k, but if the Q6600 has enough muscle to handle encoding at the settings I currently use then that's all that really matters.
On December 05 2012 19:54 DooMNoThx wrote:
Why dont you switch your cpu and gpu, start playing sc2 on Q6600 + GTX 560 and use the second machine to stream, with the i7 2600k & the gtx 260.
This could work, but the problem is I won't be streaming every single thing I do so it would make more sense for my main computer to have all the expensive/new parts I bought fairly recently 
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On December 05 2012 19:08 Ropid wrote:
Doesn't capturing itself drop the FPS, even without any encoding on the CPU? It perhaps sucks up graphics card memory bandwidth from accessing the frame buffer or something, and is unavoidable. The 120 Hz screen makes FPS drops visible, which would not be seen at 60 Hz, and capturing with a second PC could still be worth it, as duplicating output to a second monitor is completely free regarding resources.
Screen-capturing does cost some resources, but it's not really comparable to encoding. Graphics memory bandwidth typically isn't an issue at all for a GPU-light program such as SC2. The encoding is where the real performance penalties are.
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On December 05 2012 22:08 z0rz wrote:Show nested quote +On December 05 2012 19:54 DooMNoThx wrote:
Why dont you switch your cpu and gpu, start playing sc2 on Q6600 + GTX 560 and use the second machine to stream, with the i7 2600k & the gtx 260. This could work, but the problem is I won't be streaming every single thing I do so it would make more sense for my main computer to have all the expensive/new parts I bought fairly recently
That isn't 100% true. While being selfish, using the more powerful computer for self needs is great, you still need to consider what would be best for what you want to do.
Streaming is CPU intensive.
Let me reiterate that.
Streaming is CPU intensive. Also depending on the game it can start bogging down your GPU as well. All in all, if you want to stream (even if it isn't everything you do) You want to pool your strongest resources to cover whatever is most taxing. Getting a capture card is beneficial to help disperse the load from the CPU and GPU. As the card takes most of the render and encoding jobs, leaving the CPU to work other computations (I'm being vague due to my own lack of knowledge).
So, the choice is yours.
Have lower quality streams using a less powerful computer.
-or-
Have higher quality streams using a more powerful computer.
P.S. The streaming community is spoiled with 720p and 1080p streams, and will literally leave your stream because the quality is not HD. It's a sad truth, but not much you can do.
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On December 05 2012 18:33 Rannasha wrote:
In all the encoding-related benchmarks in the Anandtech comparison, the 2600K is at least twice as fast as the Q6600. And this is without overclocks. Your 2600K has a larger overclock-percentage than your Q6600, so that adds up even more.
SC2 only uses 2 CPU cores, the 2600K has 4 (+ hyperthreading). This means that SC2 will use at most half of the power of your CPU (in practice it'll be less than half) and since your main CPU is more than twice as powerful as your old one, the new CPU will still have more power left for streaming than the old one does.
So I would say that getting a capture card is a waste of money and you're better of lowering your stream quality if your ingame fps is insufficient for your needs.
lulwut? Hes asking if he can use his old pc to capture his gameplay from his new pc... None of what you said has anything to do with what he asked aside from saying (the obvious) that the 2600k is faster than the Q6600. The Q6600 is still an excellent cpu and I can say (from personal experience) that I was able to stream on a Q8200 that was slightly overclocked to 3.1 Ghz and I was able to stream at 720p on it.
To the OP, Yes, you can use your old pc to capture and stream your new pc. What type of capture card you going to get? And do you have a large fanbase? Because if not, I would NOT go through all the trouble and spend all the money on a nice capture card as you will never really put it to use.
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On December 06 2012 01:01 LgNKami wrote:Show nested quote +On December 05 2012 18:33 Rannasha wrote:
In all the encoding-related benchmarks in the Anandtech comparison, the 2600K is at least twice as fast as the Q6600. And this is without overclocks. Your 2600K has a larger overclock-percentage than your Q6600, so that adds up even more.
SC2 only uses 2 CPU cores, the 2600K has 4 (+ hyperthreading). This means that SC2 will use at most half of the power of your CPU (in practice it'll be less than half) and since your main CPU is more than twice as powerful as your old one, the new CPU will still have more power left for streaming than the old one does.
So I would say that getting a capture card is a waste of money and you're better of lowering your stream quality if your ingame fps is insufficient for your needs. lulwut? Hes asking if he can use his old pc to capture his gameplay from his new pc... None of what you said has anything to do with what he asked aside from saying (the obvious) that the 2600k is faster than the q6600. To the OP, Yes, you can use your old pc to capture and stream your new pc. What type of capture card you going to get? And do you have a large fanbase? Because if not, I would NOT go through all the trouble and spend all the money on a nice capture card as you will never really put it to use.
He was asking if there was even a point of buying a capture card to encode on his old pc.
Cutting out the spec-lists, these are the 3 things that the TS actually asked:
On December 05 2012 17:55 z0rz wrote:
Do you guys think my old PC would help if I used it as a dedicated streaming machine?
Will the Q6600 be able to handle the load, or will my stream quality suffer?
Is it even worth getting a capture card and trying?
My reply directly answers these questions. Your answer on the other hand doesn't answer any.
I argued that since his new CPU is so much faster than his old one and since SC2 only uses up a small part of the CPU power, there would be nothing gained from having the 2600K play the game and the Q6600 do the encoding. He's better of just doing everything on his main machine.
Of course, some other ideas in this thread, such as swapping the videocards to make the Q6600 machine the gaming machine would actually work. But simply hooking up the old machine as encoding-rig isn't going to make a difference.
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On December 05 2012 23:26 Zenatsu wrote:Show nested quote +On December 05 2012 22:08 z0rz wrote:On December 05 2012 19:54 DooMNoThx wrote:
Why dont you switch your cpu and gpu, start playing sc2 on Q6600 + GTX 560 and use the second machine to stream, with the i7 2600k & the gtx 260. This could work, but the problem is I won't be streaming every single thing I do so it would make more sense for my main computer to have all the expensive/new parts I bought fairly recently That isn't 100% true. While being selfish, using the more powerful computer for self needs is great, you still need to consider what would be best for what you want to do. Streaming is CPU intensive. Let me reiterate that. Streaming is CPU intensive. Also depending on the game it can start bogging down your GPU as well. All in all, if you want to stream (even if it isn't everything you do) You want to pool your strongest resources to cover whatever is most taxing. Getting a capture card is beneficial to help disperse the load from the CPU and GPU. As the card takes most of the render and encoding jobs, leaving the CPU to work other computations (I'm being vague due to my own lack of knowledge). So, the choice is yours. Have lower quality streams using a less powerful computer. -or- Have higher quality streams using a more powerful computer. P.S. The streaming community is spoiled with 720p and 1080p streams, and will literally leave your stream because the quality is not HD. It's a sad truth, but not much you can do.
Yeah, I know how taxing the process of streaming can be on a CPU. And I'm also very aware that my i7 is significantly better than my C2Q in every measurable way, and I would wager it can encode AND run games more efficiently than the Q6600 can simply encode. But that doesn't mean offloading the stream to a weaker CPU is *guaranteed* to decrease stream quality if the weaker CPU can still manage the same workload (obviously with less headroom), right?
Here's how I interpret it, so please correct me if I'm wrong because I probably am (completely making up numbers here, bear with me):
a) 2600k while streaming and gaming -> 60% CPU load but noticeable loss in frames due to screen capture.
b) Q6600 while just streaming -> 90% CPU load, no noticeable loss in framerate for main PC.
My question is whether or not b) is actually feasible with a Q6600 on my current OBS settings (my other question is whether or not that's even the right way of thinking about this haha).
And yeah, the streaming community can be quite fickle haha. Sacrificing quality for performance isn't what I'm looking to do here-- I'm just looking for a free boost to performance (however unlikely it may be). Would a capture card alleviate my decreasing FPS issues on a single PC setup?
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On December 06 2012 01:04 Rannasha wrote:Show nested quote +On December 06 2012 01:01 LgNKami wrote:On December 05 2012 18:33 Rannasha wrote:
In all the encoding-related benchmarks in the Anandtech comparison, the 2600K is at least twice as fast as the Q6600. And this is without overclocks. Your 2600K has a larger overclock-percentage than your Q6600, so that adds up even more.
SC2 only uses 2 CPU cores, the 2600K has 4 (+ hyperthreading). This means that SC2 will use at most half of the power of your CPU (in practice it'll be less than half) and since your main CPU is more than twice as powerful as your old one, the new CPU will still have more power left for streaming than the old one does.
So I would say that getting a capture card is a waste of money and you're better of lowering your stream quality if your ingame fps is insufficient for your needs. lulwut? Hes asking if he can use his old pc to capture his gameplay from his new pc... None of what you said has anything to do with what he asked aside from saying (the obvious) that the 2600k is faster than the q6600. To the OP, Yes, you can use your old pc to capture and stream your new pc. What type of capture card you going to get? And do you have a large fanbase? Because if not, I would NOT go through all the trouble and spend all the money on a nice capture card as you will never really put it to use. He was asking if there was even a point of buying a capture card to encode on his old pc. Cutting out the spec-lists, these are the 3 things that the TS actually asked: Show nested quote +On December 05 2012 17:55 z0rz wrote:
Do you guys think my old PC would help if I used it as a dedicated streaming machine?
Will the Q6600 be able to handle the load, or will my stream quality suffer?
Is it even worth getting a capture card and trying? My reply directly answers these questions. Your answer on the other hand doesn't answer any. I argued that since his new CPU is so much faster than his old one and since SC2 only uses up a small part of the CPU power, there would be nothing gained from having the 2600K play the game and the Q6600 do the encoding. He's better of just doing everything on his main machine. Of course, some other ideas in this thread, such as swapping the videocards to make the Q6600 machine the gaming machine would actually work. But simply hooking up the old machine as encoding-rig isn't going to make a difference.
It will make a huge difference as it will take all the load off of his current pc and put it on the Q6600 (which is more than capable of doing 720p). I really dont see what the issue is and why people are telling him not to do it.
Yeah, I know how taxing the process of streaming can be on a CPU. And I'm also very aware that my i7 is significantly better than my C2Q in every measurable way, and I would wager it can encode AND run games more efficiently than the Q6600 can simply encode. But that doesn't mean offloading the stream to a weaker CPU is *guaranteed* to decrease stream quality if the weaker CPU can still manage the same workload (obviously with less headroom), right?
Here's how I interpret it, so please correct me if I'm wrong because I probably am (completely making up numbers here, bear with me):
a) 2600k while streaming and gaming -> 60% CPU load but noticeable loss in frames due to screen capture.
b) Q6600 while just streaming -> 90% CPU load, no noticeable loss in framerate for main PC.
My question is whether or not b) is actually feasible with a Q6600 on my current OBS settings (my other question is whether or not that's even the right way of thinking about this haha).
And yeah, the streaming community can be quite fickle haha. Sacrificing quality for performance isn't what I'm looking to do here-- I'm just looking for a free boost to performance (however unlikely it may be). Would a capture card alleviate my decreasing FPS issues on a single PC setup?
It will make a difference. And 720p 45fps wont put a Q6600 and 90% load, maybe around 60 or 70ish (thats all depending on what encoding speed you're using though). But yea, the Q6600 pc is more than capable of capturing and streaming your main pc.
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My suggestion: try and find someplace you can return the capture card if it doesn't work out.
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On December 06 2012 01:04 Rannasha wrote:
Of course, some other ideas in this thread, such as swapping the videocards to make the Q6600 machine the gaming machine would actually work.
I get what you guys are saying, but there's more to it when swapping different generations of hardware. I'm using a SATA3 SSD for Windows with a partition for Intel's Smart Response Technology (LGA775 is SATA2 only, no Intel SRT), etc etc. I'd be sacrificing a lot of features I enjoy with the Z68 chipset if it was only used as a dedicated streaming rig. Plus, like I said, I won't be streaming EVERYTHING I do and would rather use the 2600k 100% of the time, rather than 50% of the time and only for streaming purposes. If the Q6600 can't handle the streaming duty, it makes more sense to me to just sell the Q6600 machine and use the cash to buy a capture card (if it helps a single PC) or a better video card rather than mix and match parts.
On December 06 2012 01:01 LgNKami wrote:
To the OP, Yes, you can use your old pc to capture and stream your new pc. What type of capture card you going to get? And do you have a large fanbase? Because if not, I would NOT go through all the trouble and spend all the money on a nice capture card as you will never really put it to use.
I don't know very much about capture cards, so I have no clue what I'd get yet. Another tough question but I'll throw it out there-- what do you think would have a bigger impact on my framerate while streaming: a better video card or a capture card for my Q6600 machine? Maybe a better video card will put me so far above 120fps that the drop from streaming won't make a noticeable impact haha
On December 06 2012 01:41 MisterFred wrote:
My suggestion: try and find someplace you can return the capture card if it doesn't work out.
You win. WHY DIDN'T I THINK OF THIS!!!
PS Thank you all for the input, this has been really helpful! :D
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United Kingdom20285 Posts
Stop giving bad advice if you cant back it up.
You are going to have performance hits from capturing the screen, NOT from encoding if you have your settings anywhere close to right in sc2.
Now im not really certain how capture cards work, but you should be able to either get full benefit and be able to encode at the max resolution/fps setting (1080p30, 720p60) you have available with plenty of CPU room while playing sc2 on the 3770k while getting all of the benefits from the card, OR use the capture card and second system to avoid more of the performance penalties from single-system capture, offsetting it entirely or almost entirely to the second PC (if you cant remove it from the primary) as far as i know. Its not really clear if you can completely remove the performance hits but Destiny's post on the live gamer HD seem to indicate good performance on a single-PC setup with it, though still a lot lower than normal
Would a capture card alleviate my decreasing FPS issues on a single PC setup?
Yes, but not entirely fix and its unclear if you can get better performance than the single-pc "fixed" performance with dual PC and capture card.
Screen-capturing does cost some resources, but it's not really comparable to encoding. Graphics memory bandwidth typically isn't an issue at all for a GPU-light program such as SC2. The encoding is where the real performance penalties are.
And this is why the game uses 20% CPU and runs at 300fps when not capturing, uses 20% CPU and runs at 170fps while capturing with OBS and runs at 60% CPU and 170fps while encoding at high end settings, right?
Ive never seen anybody with a sufficient CPU actuly take major performance hits from encoding, whereas everybody seems to get them from using one of many capture methods.
You dont actuly need the CPU performance from the c2quad to do what you want to do - people ran 1920x1080@30fps and 1280x720@60fps streams while playing sc2 from first gen i7's, the 3770k is far superior (http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/47?vs=551&i=27.28.38.39)
so the only question really is if you can lose less performance by using capture card to a second system, on top of the better performance you would get by using capture card in a single-system setup. Im really not sure, but for a system like yours, encoding will NOT be holding back your game performance, its all down to capture methods.
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I might not have given enough information-- as noted, I have a 120Hz monitor and I dip well below 120fps (this is obviously quite noticeable on my end, but probably undetected by my viewers) while streaming, despite having plenty of headroom on my CPU. Maintaining 120+fps while streaming is probably a lot to ask in the first place, but that's why I thought I'd ask you guys-- maybe someone has run a similar secondary PC for streaming purposes (or a similar primary computer, as LgNKami seems to have experience with). I'm not looking to run more aggressive settings with my CPU, I'm looking for a possible way to remove the framerate loss I experience while streaming.
Again, I don't know what goes on behind the scenes with these encoders, but I do know that my CPU can handle a lot of strain and that I still manage to experience slowdowns in games while streaming with conservative settings. I figure it's either:
a) natural to experience some sort of decrease in framerate while streaming due to the screen capture process (regardless of CPU load. Loss of framerate might go undetected in many cases due to excessive framerate in the first place.. I probably wouldn't notice any of this at 60Hz ), or
b) something is wrong on my end, but nothing I've checked or tested shows any signs of error.
Totally open to being wrong about a), but that's what it seems like from my limited experience.
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United Kingdom20285 Posts
Its A, and you would notice it at 60hz. Its one of the biggest complaints by far (encoding is almost completely invisible if you have a sufficient CPU)
Regardless of what you are doing, in sc2 you wont be able to get minimum framerates in worst case situations of higher than 30-40 on current CPU's, and framerate naturally drops throughout the game, and screen capture cuts into that and your average framerates by a massive amount, so you cant expect to hold anywhere near 120fps, even just running the game.
By using a capture card you would be trying to remove the performance hit (loss of fps, some input lag) from the capture process so the game would perform as if you were just playing the game, or much closer to it
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Awesome, thanks for clearing that up for me!
I'm still not quite sure if my money is better spent on a better video card to just bump up my framerate in general, or if I should use that money to grab a capture card (which is still a big grey area because I'm not 100% convinced that my old PC can handle stream encoding, or whether or not a capture card would make a worthy impact if I used it in my main PC. It also might not fit in my main PC with all my other parts installed haha).
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United Kingdom20285 Posts
560ti is a capable card especially for sc2, if you are playing on max settings it might help some to get a stronger GPU but i wouldnt count on it. SLI is also a nightmare for screen capture and compatibility as far as i know
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GTX 560 without ti, with ti, even the 560 SE (shitty edition) is overkill for any level of graphics settings in SC2. There will be exactly ZERO benefits to a better graphics card for SC2.
You wouldn't have much problem running SC2's graphics on a gpu drawn on a paper napkin.
Other games, sure, particularly if you can go up to 120fps. But not SC2.
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Yeah SC2 isn't really the problem, but other games can get pretty rough on higher settings while streaming.
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EPT
