7 Powerful Tips For Streaming on a Low-End PC
**Setting Up Your PC for Smooth Game Streaming**
If you're planning to stream games on your PC, it's essential to set up your system correctly to ensure a smooth experience. One crucial aspect is setting the frame rate (fps) and bit rate for optimal performance.
**Choosing the Right Frame Rate**
While 60fps is ideal for streaming games with fast-paced action, it can be challenging to run at this level on lower-end PCs. I recommend starting with 60fps and then implementing all the settings discussed in this video. If you still experience issues, try reducing the frame rate to 30fps. For games like card games with minimal movement, setting the frame rate to 30fps is sufficient.
**Output Settings**
To access advanced settings, ensure you're using the NVIDIA or x264 encoder options. Selecting NVENC or x264 will require different settings, but not significantly so. You'll need to set up your bit rate for both encoders.
For a 720p stream at 60fps, select a bit rate of 4500. For 720p at 30fps, choose 3000. However, there's an additional important consideration: your internet upload speed. Conduct an internet speed test using Speedtest.net and multiply the result by 800. This will give you the maximum bit rate you can enter.
Refer to Twitch's encoding chart for recommended bit rates per resolution. Avoid exceeding these values, even with fast internet speeds.
**Other Settings**
For NVENC and x264 encoding, disable unnecessary options. In streaming encoder settings:
* Disable rescale output
* Set keyframe interval to 2
* Preset to max performance
* Profile to main
* Disable look-ahead
* Enable psycho visual tuning
* Set GPU to zero
* Max b frames to through
For x264 encoding, also disable unnecessary options. In streaming encoder settings:
* Disable rescale output
* Disable use custom buffer size
* Set keyframe interval to 2
* CPU usage to very fast
* Profile to main
* Tune to none
* Leave the last box blank
If you still experience issues, try reducing your stream's frame rate or lowering the quality of your settings.
**Additional Tips**
If you're using Streamlabs OBS and encounter problems, consider switching to OBS Studio. Check out my overlay setup tutorial for a great resource, and explore my OBS Studio playlist for more tutorials. If any of these tips have helped you, comment below!
WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enah this is gonna be a good one if you followed this video then i guarantee you that you will see an improvement in your stream's performance and if your pc is at least half decent your stream will be pretty smooth see the problem with stream settings guys is that most people test settings using a pc like this that's my pc i'm the problem i'm talking about so i decided to use this 10 year old laptop to try and find settings that are holding backstream performance and to come up with settings that are so easy to run that even this little toaster could ruin the stream and let me know down in the comments what kind of machine you are streaming on is it a very old laptop like this one is it a pretty decent laptop but is it still holding you back or maybe you're streaming on an old desktop let me know in the comments i'm really curious about that now this laptop is really crappy and i want to deliver a high quality video to you so the stuff that you'll see while i'm talking will be recorded on my main pc we can start with broad general fixes and then gradually dive deeper into the specific settings the reason that i'm starting with broad general fixes is because if you can't run your stream is that it's more likely that your problem isn't in the settings but that it's something windows game or overlay related we'll get into that tip number one hit the like button to boost my video in the youtube algorithm it really helps so i would appreciate it this video is sponsored by onto tv they have a big webshop for stream graphics and they have a lot of designs in many different themes once you go to their website you can browse through a bunch of options and once you find something you might like you can test out all the different elements by using their preview widget all their designs are completely modular which means that the design that you create after buying an overlay pack from them will be different from that of someone else so you will have a unique stream paying someone to design you a personal overlay can be really expensive and if it isn't then chances are that it will look very cheap and not appealing so if paying for a high quality custom design is something you can't afford then i genuinely think that buying from owned is a very good choice but for real now the first step is one of the most important ones if you're having trouble streaming because your pc can't handle it and you're using streamlabs obs then stop using streamlabs obs and use obs studio instead i know for a fact that many of my viewers use streamlabs obs and it's understandable it looks like an updated version of obs studio right and it's easier for beginners to add labels and alerts and all that stuff all within the program but streamlabs obs is also harder for your pc to run compared to obs studio many people who make the switch can actually see a pretty big difference in pc performance so if you're one of the people who will have to make the switch then don't worry because later in this video we will go over the settings that you need in obs studio and if you're worried about redoing your whole overlay setup don't be because you can easily transfer your overlay setup from streamlabs obs to obs studio by launching obs and going to scene collection import and then importing those scene collections they will all be added to obs and you can check them out one by one and then either remove it if you don't need it or rename it if it was one of your main scene collections you're welcome and if you're worried about anything obs studio related because you'll maybe have to make the switch or if you have any questions about obs studio you can go to my obs studio master course playlist and that playlist contains a bunch of videos all about obs studio about setting it up changing things improving it you can go there if you have any questions or you can also join my discord because their people are all helping each other it's full of people who are streaming who are trying to stream who already stream for a long time and everyone just answers each other's questions the link to my discord is also in my description tip number two now that you've probably chosen to use obs studio or if you're already using it always run it as administrator you can go to the properties click on advanced and then enable run as administrator right here so then it will automatically launch as admin every time you start it and with this tip i will probably lose 30 percent of my viewers because this is a real hack it will literally completely fix performance issues for some people but the next step will improve your stability even more so please keep watching okay so why does running obs as administrator help so much it's pretty simple let me explain you usually when you're gaming windows will set your game as the absolute first priority over all your other programs like your browser for example because you don't need your browser while gaming right however it will also prioritize your game over your streaming program and that's where we have an issue because only after giving your game all the processing power it desires then obs and your other programs will get what's left over and that's a real problem but when you launch obs studio as administrator then windows will prioritize obs over your game or at least put them on the same level instead of allowing your game to take all the resources it desires and i'm giving the leftovers to obs by the way props to harris heller for this tip because i didn't know this and it actually helps a lot of people my third app is something that's often overlooked when giving advice for streaming on slow pcs since decent machines won't run into this problem but close every program you can including the invisible ones and clean up your starter program when you go to the hidden running programs you will probably see a bunch of them that are currently running but which you actually don't really need these are all taking up resources and when using a slow pc you need every bit that's available to run obs and your game so just close all things that you're not using you can also prevent a bunch of these things from even launching in the first place by cleaning up your startup list press ctrl shift escape on your keyboard and then go to the startup tab you will see a bunch of programs here and all those that have the enabled status are things that are launched automatically when your pc starts cleaning these is easy and fast and it will save you a lot of extra work every time you want to stream because these programs are just not launching and as a bonus this decreases the time that your pc needs to boot up my boot time was 28.5 seconds and after disabling only a few programs here i got it down to 25.7 seconds that's a pretty decent increase in performance you know what else gives a decent increase in performance hitting the like button under this video it will help me rank above others so i would greatly appreciate it my fourth tip might sound obvious but many people start looking for better obs settings while an easy solution might be to lower the settings of the game that they are playing for example the anti-aliasing shadows reflections texture quality or just in general lowering the settings from high to medium or from medium to low or stuff like that so your stream isn't going to see your game in the same amazing quality that you are seeing it on your screen no matter how high you set your settings so if your pc can barely handle streaming games then just play the game at a lower setting because that will help you a lot also make sure to check if your game isn't upscaling your resolution that sometimes gets enabled automatically and it messes with even the best pcs and if you're really desperate to stream and your pc can't handle it you might even want to consider lowering the overall resolution of your game by the way also keep in mind that the specific game you're playing could be too hard for your pc to run don't try to run aaa games on max settings on an average laptop and then expected to be able to stream on top of that so now that we've eliminated a lot of external factors that could influence the performance of your stream it's time to move inside obs for tip number five animated elements and high quality webcams are killing slow pcs if you're using a bunch of animated elements on one screen then don't be surprised if your pc has trouble handling it if your pc is having problems running your stream and you use a bunch of animated elements like animated webcam borders labels alerts screen effects and whatnot then a possibility would be to keep animated alerts but replace all the other moving elements with static versions the guys from owntwitch is a sponsor of this video and sells stream overlays always deliver animated elements and static ones with every peg so if you got an overlay from somewhere then i hope for you that they also included static elements because you will need them if they didn't include static ones and you want a professional graphics pack you can always use my discount code tvn which will slice 50 of the price of these owned overlay packs the link will be in my description and before you start thinking that i'm a sellout if you don't want to pay for an overlay i have a complete free static overlay pack on my discord server it's in a separate channel called neon overlaid pack and i update it a lot i keep adding things like more panel variations social banners and i recently added alerts for facebook streamers if you want the pack just click on the discord link in my description where my socials are and you can get it right away another overlay element that takes up a lot of processing power is your webcam if you're really desperately looking for ways to lower your cpu load that reducing the resolution of your webcam is a viable solution to try and get that extra 0.1 percent load of your pc oh yeah also if you're using any filters on your webcam like color correction or brightness and all that stuff just remove it immediately because it's eating your cpu alive if your webcam isn't bright enough and you need to add brightness don't do it in obs but just point any other light on yourself my sixth tip is something that will worsen your streaming experience but if you have no other options then this can really help it's disconnecting any extra screens and disabling your preview many streamers also laptop users connect a second screen to manage their stream and read the chat while gaming but that takes up a lot of power from your pc power that you definitely shouldn't be allocating towards the second screen also disable your obs preview by right clicking it on the preview and then unchecking enable preview it will help and by the way if you disconnected your screen and now you can't read your chat anymore you can just use your phone or a tablet or an extra laptop i'm sure you can find something that could display your chat now keep in mind that all these steps that i'm giving are aimed towards people who have serious performance issues and have no other option besides going for the lowest settings or the most simple setup possible if you're simply optimizing your stream then you can just use a few of these tips that i'm giving but i'm sure you will be able to figure out which things will make an impact while still maintaining a good viewer experience my last tip which is tip number seven is to use mv ink instead of x264 encoding this will not be available to everyone so i will go over both nvienk and x264 settings but first what's the difference between mvnc and x264 right well it's actually pretty simple now these are both encoding settings right and then coding is taking every source that you add in obs and converting that into frames that can be sent to the streaming servers those servers then send the frames one by one to all the viewers now x264 encoding uses your cpu so your processor to do the encoding and nv yank on the other hand uses your gpus or your graphics card why will not everyone have access to nvienk well because it's only available to nvidia graphics cards starting from around the 600 series i'm not sure about that but those graphics cards have a separate and vien chip that takes complete care of the encoding without affecting your graphics card's performance so those who have a nvidia gpu that has mv yank should definitely use it you can simply open the encoder drop down and see if ivank new is in the list if it isn't you'll have to use x264 most of the settings will be quite similar so you can just follow along no matter which one of the two encoding options you need to set up for yourself but before setting up this encoding let's quickly go to the video tab if your pc is slow do not try to stream in 1080p 60fps you're just holding yourself back set both resolutions to 2080 by 720 set a downscale filter to buy linear and fps that's a tricky one now 60fps is definitely the way to go for streaming games but it's obviously harder to run for your pc compared to 30 fps i would advise you to set this to 60 and then follow all the settings implement everything that i'm talking about in this video and if then you still can't run your stream you can try to set it to 30 and then see if that helps and by the way if you're streaming games without much movement like card games then you can just set this to 30 right of the bat because you don't need 60 fps if there are not many moving elements on the screen so then next the output settings make sure you're in the advanced settings and then select nvidia and vm new if it's available for you as you see the settings for nvienk or x264 are a bit different but not that much to be honest you need to set up your bit rate for both of them so let's do that first and first of all make sure that your rate control is set to cpr now most of the time i give an in-depth explanation on the bit rate but i'll keep it very simple for this video for 720p 60fps select 4500 right here for 720p 30fps select 3000 but there is one extra important thing for the bitrate because for some people the poor performance of their stream might be caused by this number you enter right here do a quick internet speed test with speedtest.net and then look at your upload speed multiply this number by 800 i will use the windows calculator and then that result is the maximum you can enter right here as your bit rate so 3000 is a go to for 720p 30fps but if your result was lower than that then you should enter your result don't try to go as high as you can for this bit rate even if you have a really fast internet speed that just doesn't work go to google look up twitch encoding chart and that will give you an overview of the go-to bit rates for each resolution so just don't go above the ones that are listed right here now the other settings don't need much explaining for nv and encoding just disable and for streaming encoder settings disable rescale output set the keyframe interval to 2 preset to max performance profile to main disable look-ahead enable psycho visual tuning set gpu to zero and max b frames to through now quickly for x264 encoding also disable and for streaming encoder settings disable rescale output disable use custom buffer size set keyframe interval to through cpu usage to very fast profile to main tune to none and then leave the last box blank now once second you can change for x264 encoding is a cpu usage preset if you're still not able to run your stream you can lower this from very fast to super fast or in the worst case scenario to ultra fast the higher you go in this list so the faster you go the lower your quality will be but the easier it will be for your pc now if that still doesn't work try setting it from 60 fps to 30 fps in the video settings and if that still doesn't work then you'll have a real problem because streaming will be very hard for you try to set your game at the absolute lowest settings possible try to implement everything i said during this video but there's not really much you can do besides this to actually be able to stream if you're still having a laggy stream after doing all these things now if you were using streamlabs obs before this video and you are having problems then you're probably going to switch to obs studio or you already did so then you will probably need to set up some of those things right now comment down below if any of these tips actually helped you by the way liking my video helps me a lot with youtube algorithm so i would greatly appreciate that now this is my setup tutorial for my free overlay so if you're looking for an overlay that's a great video for you to watch also check my obs studio playlist because that contains a lot of obs tutorials and other than that i hope to see you in one of my other videos i will see you in the next one thanks for watching have a nice dayah this is gonna be a good one if you followed this video then i guarantee you that you will see an improvement in your stream's performance and if your pc is at least half decent your stream will be pretty smooth see the problem with stream settings guys is that most people test settings using a pc like this that's my pc i'm the problem i'm talking about so i decided to use this 10 year old laptop to try and find settings that are holding backstream performance and to come up with settings that are so easy to run that even this little toaster could ruin the stream and let me know down in the comments what kind of machine you are streaming on is it a very old laptop like this one is it a pretty decent laptop but is it still holding you back or maybe you're streaming on an old desktop let me know in the comments i'm really curious about that now this laptop is really crappy and i want to deliver a high quality video to you so the stuff that you'll see while i'm talking will be recorded on my main pc we can start with broad general fixes and then gradually dive deeper into the specific settings the reason that i'm starting with broad general fixes is because if you can't run your stream is that it's more likely that your problem isn't in the settings but that it's something windows game or overlay related we'll get into that tip number one hit the like button to boost my video in the youtube algorithm it really helps so i would appreciate it this video is sponsored by onto tv they have a big webshop for stream graphics and they have a lot of designs in many different themes once you go to their website you can browse through a bunch of options and once you find something you might like you can test out all the different elements by using their preview widget all their designs are completely modular which means that the design that you create after buying an overlay pack from them will be different from that of someone else so you will have a unique stream paying someone to design you a personal overlay can be really expensive and if it isn't then chances are that it will look very cheap and not appealing so if paying for a high quality custom design is something you can't afford then i genuinely think that buying from owned is a very good choice but for real now the first step is one of the most important ones if you're having trouble streaming because your pc can't handle it and you're using streamlabs obs then stop using streamlabs obs and use obs studio instead i know for a fact that many of my viewers use streamlabs obs and it's understandable it looks like an updated version of obs studio right and it's easier for beginners to add labels and alerts and all that stuff all within the program but streamlabs obs is also harder for your pc to run compared to obs studio many people who make the switch can actually see a pretty big difference in pc performance so if you're one of the people who will have to make the switch then don't worry because later in this video we will go over the settings that you need in obs studio and if you're worried about redoing your whole overlay setup don't be because you can easily transfer your overlay setup from streamlabs obs to obs studio by launching obs and going to scene collection import and then importing those scene collections they will all be added to obs and you can check them out one by one and then either remove it if you don't need it or rename it if it was one of your main scene collections you're welcome and if you're worried about anything obs studio related because you'll maybe have to make the switch or if you have any questions about obs studio you can go to my obs studio master course playlist and that playlist contains a bunch of videos all about obs studio about setting it up changing things improving it you can go there if you have any questions or you can also join my discord because their people are all helping each other it's full of people who are streaming who are trying to stream who already stream for a long time and everyone just answers each other's questions the link to my discord is also in my description tip number two now that you've probably chosen to use obs studio or if you're already using it always run it as administrator you can go to the properties click on advanced and then enable run as administrator right here so then it will automatically launch as admin every time you start it and with this tip i will probably lose 30 percent of my viewers because this is a real hack it will literally completely fix performance issues for some people but the next step will improve your stability even more so please keep watching okay so why does running obs as administrator help so much it's pretty simple let me explain you usually when you're gaming windows will set your game as the absolute first priority over all your other programs like your browser for example because you don't need your browser while gaming right however it will also prioritize your game over your streaming program and that's where we have an issue because only after giving your game all the processing power it desires then obs and your other programs will get what's left over and that's a real problem but when you launch obs studio as administrator then windows will prioritize obs over your game or at least put them on the same level instead of allowing your game to take all the resources it desires and i'm giving the leftovers to obs by the way props to harris heller for this tip because i didn't know this and it actually helps a lot of people my third app is something that's often overlooked when giving advice for streaming on slow pcs since decent machines won't run into this problem but close every program you can including the invisible ones and clean up your starter program when you go to the hidden running programs you will probably see a bunch of them that are currently running but which you actually don't really need these are all taking up resources and when using a slow pc you need every bit that's available to run obs and your game so just close all things that you're not using you can also prevent a bunch of these things from even launching in the first place by cleaning up your startup list press ctrl shift escape on your keyboard and then go to the startup tab you will see a bunch of programs here and all those that have the enabled status are things that are launched automatically when your pc starts cleaning these is easy and fast and it will save you a lot of extra work every time you want to stream because these programs are just not launching and as a bonus this decreases the time that your pc needs to boot up my boot time was 28.5 seconds and after disabling only a few programs here i got it down to 25.7 seconds that's a pretty decent increase in performance you know what else gives a decent increase in performance hitting the like button under this video it will help me rank above others so i would greatly appreciate it my fourth tip might sound obvious but many people start looking for better obs settings while an easy solution might be to lower the settings of the game that they are playing for example the anti-aliasing shadows reflections texture quality or just in general lowering the settings from high to medium or from medium to low or stuff like that so your stream isn't going to see your game in the same amazing quality that you are seeing it on your screen no matter how high you set your settings so if your pc can barely handle streaming games then just play the game at a lower setting because that will help you a lot also make sure to check if your game isn't upscaling your resolution that sometimes gets enabled automatically and it messes with even the best pcs and if you're really desperate to stream and your pc can't handle it you might even want to consider lowering the overall resolution of your game by the way also keep in mind that the specific game you're playing could be too hard for your pc to run don't try to run aaa games on max settings on an average laptop and then expected to be able to stream on top of that so now that we've eliminated a lot of external factors that could influence the performance of your stream it's time to move inside obs for tip number five animated elements and high quality webcams are killing slow pcs if you're using a bunch of animated elements on one screen then don't be surprised if your pc has trouble handling it if your pc is having problems running your stream and you use a bunch of animated elements like animated webcam borders labels alerts screen effects and whatnot then a possibility would be to keep animated alerts but replace all the other moving elements with static versions the guys from owntwitch is a sponsor of this video and sells stream overlays always deliver animated elements and static ones with every peg so if you got an overlay from somewhere then i hope for you that they also included static elements because you will need them if they didn't include static ones and you want a professional graphics pack you can always use my discount code tvn which will slice 50 of the price of these owned overlay packs the link will be in my description and before you start thinking that i'm a sellout if you don't want to pay for an overlay i have a complete free static overlay pack on my discord server it's in a separate channel called neon overlaid pack and i update it a lot i keep adding things like more panel variations social banners and i recently added alerts for facebook streamers if you want the pack just click on the discord link in my description where my socials are and you can get it right away another overlay element that takes up a lot of processing power is your webcam if you're really desperately looking for ways to lower your cpu load that reducing the resolution of your webcam is a viable solution to try and get that extra 0.1 percent load of your pc oh yeah also if you're using any filters on your webcam like color correction or brightness and all that stuff just remove it immediately because it's eating your cpu alive if your webcam isn't bright enough and you need to add brightness don't do it in obs but just point any other light on yourself my sixth tip is something that will worsen your streaming experience but if you have no other options then this can really help it's disconnecting any extra screens and disabling your preview many streamers also laptop users connect a second screen to manage their stream and read the chat while gaming but that takes up a lot of power from your pc power that you definitely shouldn't be allocating towards the second screen also disable your obs preview by right clicking it on the preview and then unchecking enable preview it will help and by the way if you disconnected your screen and now you can't read your chat anymore you can just use your phone or a tablet or an extra laptop i'm sure you can find something that could display your chat now keep in mind that all these steps that i'm giving are aimed towards people who have serious performance issues and have no other option besides going for the lowest settings or the most simple setup possible if you're simply optimizing your stream then you can just use a few of these tips that i'm giving but i'm sure you will be able to figure out which things will make an impact while still maintaining a good viewer experience my last tip which is tip number seven is to use mv ink instead of x264 encoding this will not be available to everyone so i will go over both nvienk and x264 settings but first what's the difference between mvnc and x264 right well it's actually pretty simple now these are both encoding settings right and then coding is taking every source that you add in obs and converting that into frames that can be sent to the streaming servers those servers then send the frames one by one to all the viewers now x264 encoding uses your cpu so your processor to do the encoding and nv yank on the other hand uses your gpus or your graphics card why will not everyone have access to nvienk well because it's only available to nvidia graphics cards starting from around the 600 series i'm not sure about that but those graphics cards have a separate and vien chip that takes complete care of the encoding without affecting your graphics card's performance so those who have a nvidia gpu that has mv yank should definitely use it you can simply open the encoder drop down and see if ivank new is in the list if it isn't you'll have to use x264 most of the settings will be quite similar so you can just follow along no matter which one of the two encoding options you need to set up for yourself but before setting up this encoding let's quickly go to the video tab if your pc is slow do not try to stream in 1080p 60fps you're just holding yourself back set both resolutions to 2080 by 720 set a downscale filter to buy linear and fps that's a tricky one now 60fps is definitely the way to go for streaming games but it's obviously harder to run for your pc compared to 30 fps i would advise you to set this to 60 and then follow all the settings implement everything that i'm talking about in this video and if then you still can't run your stream you can try to set it to 30 and then see if that helps and by the way if you're streaming games without much movement like card games then you can just set this to 30 right of the bat because you don't need 60 fps if there are not many moving elements on the screen so then next the output settings make sure you're in the advanced settings and then select nvidia and vm new if it's available for you as you see the settings for nvienk or x264 are a bit different but not that much to be honest you need to set up your bit rate for both of them so let's do that first and first of all make sure that your rate control is set to cpr now most of the time i give an in-depth explanation on the bit rate but i'll keep it very simple for this video for 720p 60fps select 4500 right here for 720p 30fps select 3000 but there is one extra important thing for the bitrate because for some people the poor performance of their stream might be caused by this number you enter right here do a quick internet speed test with speedtest.net and then look at your upload speed multiply this number by 800 i will use the windows calculator and then that result is the maximum you can enter right here as your bit rate so 3000 is a go to for 720p 30fps but if your result was lower than that then you should enter your result don't try to go as high as you can for this bit rate even if you have a really fast internet speed that just doesn't work go to google look up twitch encoding chart and that will give you an overview of the go-to bit rates for each resolution so just don't go above the ones that are listed right here now the other settings don't need much explaining for nv and encoding just disable and for streaming encoder settings disable rescale output set the keyframe interval to 2 preset to max performance profile to main disable look-ahead enable psycho visual tuning set gpu to zero and max b frames to through now quickly for x264 encoding also disable and for streaming encoder settings disable rescale output disable use custom buffer size set keyframe interval to through cpu usage to very fast profile to main tune to none and then leave the last box blank now once second you can change for x264 encoding is a cpu usage preset if you're still not able to run your stream you can lower this from very fast to super fast or in the worst case scenario to ultra fast the higher you go in this list so the faster you go the lower your quality will be but the easier it will be for your pc now if that still doesn't work try setting it from 60 fps to 30 fps in the video settings and if that still doesn't work then you'll have a real problem because streaming will be very hard for you try to set your game at the absolute lowest settings possible try to implement everything i said during this video but there's not really much you can do besides this to actually be able to stream if you're still having a laggy stream after doing all these things now if you were using streamlabs obs before this video and you are having problems then you're probably going to switch to obs studio or you already did so then you will probably need to set up some of those things right now comment down below if any of these tips actually helped you by the way liking my video helps me a lot with youtube algorithm so i would greatly appreciate that now this is my setup tutorial for my free overlay so if you're looking for an overlay that's a great video for you to watch also check my obs studio playlist because that contains a lot of obs tutorials and other than that i hope to see you in one of my other videos i will see you in the next one thanks for watching have a nice day