Published , by Chris Jarrard
Published , by Chris Jarrard
Video game streaming has become just as important as playing the games as we open 2019. In the past, you had to play the games yourself if you wanted to consume their content. Thanks to the rise in streaming, there are many way to enjoy a game. Being able to stream a game to Twitch or Youtube with professional looking results typically requires complicated dual-PC setups for the best results, but thanks to new updates to OBS and the power of NVIDIA’s RTX GPUs, PC gamers can now get pro-quality streams from a single PC.
During CES 2019, the Shacknews street team got a chance to stop by the NVIDIA booth and get a first-hand look at how the new RTX GPUs make playing and streaming from the same PC a piece of cake. The team at NVIDIA walked us through the benefits of the new OBS update and showed off some of the new MaxQ laptops that make use of the technology.
While OBS has offered NVENC GPU encoding support for live streams prior to now, NVIDIA gave the OBS team access to the NVENC SDK. The OBS team was able to make huge gains in performance and image quality. Traditionally, when streaming at the bit rates allowed by Twitch, using software-based x264 encoding provided noticeably better picture quality than the less CPU-intensive NVENC encoding. The amount of CPU horsepower needed for x264 encoding would often cause performance issues with the games, so the ability to get great picture quality using NVENC with negligible performance impact will be great for streamers just starting out.
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