**Setting Up My Streaming Rig**

I've been experimenting with different settings to capture smooth gameplay footage. Currently, I'm using the "Game Capture" feature which is capable of capturing up to 100-110 frames per second (fps), depending on my settings. However, this may not be representative of a typical streamer's experience. When streaming, loading up a layout and adjusting settings can take a toll on performance, dropping my frame rate down to around 80-90 fps.

To mitigate these issues, I've set up an EPOS OS version of the Nerd or Die Stream OS layout, which utilizes both Inbink and X264 compression. While this setup provides a good balance between image quality and performance, it's essential to consider the specific game being played. As a fast-paced first-person shooter, fluidity is crucial for maintaining a smooth viewing experience.

**Cooking with HelloFresh**

As a new dad, I've been struggling to find time to cook meals that I enjoy. This has led me to explore alternative cooking solutions, such as meal kits from HelloFresh. Their service offers 50 menu and market items to choose from every week, including vegetarian, calorie-smart, and gourmet options. By pre-portioning ingredients and providing a wide variety of recipes, HelloFresh eliminates the stress of planning and prep time.

I've had the opportunity to try out some of these meals with my wife, and we've been impressed by the ease of preparation and cleanup. The pre-packaged ingredients mean that most of the hard part is done for you, leaving just a few minutes of chopping and cooking required. This has been particularly helpful during busy nights when I need to cook quickly. HelloFresh also offers 20-minute meals for those with limited time.

**Xbox Streaming**

If you're streaming from an Xbox, hooking it up to your capture card should provide a seamless experience. However, be aware that performance concerns may arise depending on the game being played. As a first-person shooter, fluidity is crucial, and some games may require specific settings or tweaks to achieve optimal performance.

I've found that my EPOS OS setup provides a good balance between image quality and performance, but this may vary depending on individual hardware configurations. It's essential to experiment with different settings and tweaks to find the sweet spot for your specific setup.

**Battlefield and Season 6**

The release of Battlefield has been met with server issues, which may impact our experience. However, I'm excited to dive into the campaign and explore its offerings. The early access to this game is a blessing, as it allows me to provide updates on my experiences while they're still developing.

I'm looking forward to seeing what Season 6 has in store for us and how it will be received by the community. As always, I'll be sharing my adventures with you all through live streams and video content. Be sure to join me on Discord and Twitter for behind-the-scenes insights into my cooking experiments, grilling escapades, and gaming experiences.

**Conclusion**

I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to share my gaming experiences with you all. From setting up my streaming rig to exploring new cooking solutions like HelloFresh, I'll be sharing it all with you. Whether you're a fellow gamer or just interested in cooking, I hope you'll join me on this journey and let's get ready for an exciting season of games and content.

**Sponsor Support**

A huge thank you to my sponsor, who enables me to continue creating content for you all. Their support is invaluable, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to share my passion with you. If you're interested in trying out HelloFresh, be sure to use the code "EposVox14" for up to 14 free meals and three free gifts.

**Final Thoughts**

As always, thank you for watching and supporting me on this journey. I'll see you all in the next video!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enmicrosoft in 343 industries have done it they released halo early kind of during the 20th anniversary xbox live stream today well the day before as you're probably watching this xbox showed a lot of cool stuff and we got some halo news including a teaser for the upcoming halo tv show that will be on paramount plus apparently as well as an announcement that the halo infinite multiplayer which is technically a beta until the official release date of december 8th is ready to go and playable for free on xbox and pc via game pass or steam which is really cool there were some quirks with the initial launcher that was giving people blue screens on both their xbox and pc which was pretty wild but that has mostly been fixed so just restart your system and start the download all over again it feels solid it looks absolutely beautiful but how does it stream before we go too far i did want to let you know that for backing track our stream safe video safe royalty free rock and metal music we do have a halo album coming we were trying to keep this a secret up to the official release date but since they're dropping it early i'm teasing it early we have an album called forerunner which is of course gonna be halo themed and inspired and some of the background music is being used in this video it's not done yet it will be released hopefully in time for the full release of halo infinite but i am super stoked for that and if you're looking for more music in the meantime we did just drop versus two the sequel to my favorite backing track album so far this past week so you can check it out at the links below let's jump into some game performance details first so first and foremost i feel like the game runs better than the than it did during the flight but still nowhere near as good as i'd like the game seems to run like but at least on nvidia i'm using for my specific build i'm using an rtx 3090 and a 10900k and nearing the flights i tested on rtx 3080 as well it is tough for me to get a solid frame rate at 1440p on the higher graphical settings uh i have seen reports that it's running great on amd gpus so your mileage may vary there uh the game itself is very gpu heavy not so cpu heavy which is advantageous for streaming as we'll talk about in a moment in terms of optimizing your in-game settings because it's gonna be so hard to hit your target frame rates i would definitely recommend messing with the frame rate limiter to set the minimum of 60 and the maximum to some multiple of 60 and not just running completely uncapped or targeting a higher refresh rate 120 is probably going to be your best bet at higher resolutions for now and if you're streaming you may even want to lower it lower than that and streaming i would recommend depending depending on your gpu running high or even medium settings instead of ultra of course we do have a graphic setting that made a big difference in performance for me which we'll talk about in a moment but do keep in mind when you're lowing graphic settings while of course it does make the game look less pleasing to you the lower detail the lower resolution textures the simpler textures the less graphics effects on screen does actually compress better for your stream so that's worth keeping in mind some settings to play with to try to impact your performance ambient occlusion anti-aliasing reflections lighting and shadow quality are all things you can tweak and tone down on their own without affecting the overall image quality and they can make a small difference i still feel like the game is not super optimized at the moment i don't know that it will make a huge difference for you you may have to lower the render resolution scale and that is something that i think made a huge difference for me because tweaking all these settings like i was able to claim back like one or two fps on average because it still flickers back and forth running at 1440p on high on my 3090 i was averaging 120 ish fps but it was flickering between like 110 115 and 120 kinda 117-120 range was what was happening quite a bit however dropping down to even just 90 resolution scale for the render resolution which is still 90 of 1440p pretty much not noticeable unless you're deliberately av testing or pixel peeping seems to get me a locked 120fps at least on the smaller 4v4 modes and seems to have improved my performance greatly on the big team battle modes so that's worth keeping in mind and then i do recommend checking the limit defocused frame rate to improve your alt tabbing or switching between uh obs and your game and things like that when you're streaming it'll make a huge difference for those render lag spikes when you're doing that getting into capture and streaming talk i did want to note that this game halo infinite does not have a full screen mode this was something that was a thing in the flights and drove me nuts and i had just assumed was a quirk of the flights and that they would add it back in but here we are still in beta but you know with a proper release and there is still no full screen mode you have borderless full screen or windowed this causes some issues for how the game renders on your screen shadow plays frame rate counter doesn't work and you have to enable desktop capture mode for shadow play which may mean if you're on a multi-monitor setup that is capturing your second monitor instead of your game because shadowplay likes the deer pop of that thankfully the game capture source in obs studio still works fine with this game so that's pretty awesome there do prepare for a frame rate impact on your gameplay when you open obs and start streaming with it i was running again an average of 120ish fps without obs and depending on the settings i was using with obs open i was going anywhere from 80 to 100 fps on average instead of that 120. so you will be taking that hit there unless you would want to drop all the way down to 60 and you're just gonna have to deal with it i ran my stream test with obs version 27.1.3 and streamed at 1080p 60 at eight megabits per second i'm using windows 11 and the latest nvidia game ready drivers cpu encoding because this game is very gpu heavy and not super cpu heavy at all cpu coding was actually a breeze and on my cpu obviously you got to scale it down based on yours but on my cpu cpu encoding was perfectly fine up to medium slow is not suitable for real time doesn't work in real time don't try it this is a good thing for amd users because if the game runs better on amd gpus then you're better off than the rest of us other than the fact that amd's video encoder really sucks for streaming so you can still use cpu encoding and probably be fine gpu encoding is fine as well and gets you a little bit higher in game frame rates but it will vary depending on your card and how stressed your particular card is as we kind of scale down to the 30 60s the 20 50 or not 20 20 60s and 1050 ti's as a lot of you all have noted that at least in the flights the performance wasn't great already so you will have to scale this a little bit accordingly but i do recommend trying cpu encoding first as you're going to get the least impact on your overall gpu usage however like i said i did get higher frame rates encoding with invinc even if there were some little quirks to it i will say those of you who have been on a long-running windows 10 installation will probably still need to run obs as administrator to help fight render lag competing with the game because it is that gpu heavy thankfully even at the high settings like it's not using a ton of vram so if you have a higher vram count card you're a little bit advantageous there in terms of media decoding and things like that uh however if you're running windows 11 you probably don't need to run obs as administrator as the default hacks or hardware accelerated graphics scheduler i think is the shortcut handles effectively what running obs as admin does and on windows 11 it seems to perform a lot better than it did on windows 10 for me even with an updated version of windows 10 but your mileage may very very definitely do some tests first and see which one is the way to go for you in terms of game performance based on streaming i was averaging again 115 120 fps without obs open when encoding with x264 i was holding about 90 to 99 fps so a fairly significant hit however i did not suffer any again i'm on a higher end cpu so it will scale based on your performance but because it's so gpu heavy versus cpu heavy the difference between x 264 fast medium and faster there was no significant like difference in performance impact on my game between those encoder settings so i was still holding 90 to 99 regardless of whether i was on fast or fast or medium which is kind of nice however performs a little bit more smoothly here at least on 20 and 30 series cards holding an average of 100 to 110 fps depending on your settings of course now this was all specifically with just capturing the game capture which is not super representative of someone who's streaming mainly just recording if you are streaming uh loading up a layout and things like that it's still mostly fine however you do take a higher performance hit to your actual game performance dropping me down to about 80 or 90 fps setting up my epos os version of the nerd or die stream os layout uh and that's with both inbink and x264 uh so worth keeping in mind but also keep in mind that this is a first person shooter it's a fast-paced game fluidity of your frame rate is going to matter most the viewers versus image quality on your you know still images or whatever however consider simpler scene layouts and fewer graphics on screen with this kind of game if you want to improve your overall quality as the more you have on screen the more the compressor struggles to compress everything and the worse your game will look but again fluidity is most important you know what else is important our sponsor and paying the bills so i can continue to make these videos for you been sharing my cooking experiments and progress with you all all year on discord and twitter showing my grill adventures and fancy meals my wife and i have been making inside while i'm not starting a cooking channel anytime soon despite the requests it has been fun but can i be real with you for a sec i love cooking and learning to cook and making something delicious that really gives you that feeling of just when you're done but i actually hate what comes for planning and prepping for meals as a new dad time is slim nights are hectic and i i rarely feel like i have the time to just sit down and actually plan out or prepare for the meals that i want to make during the week and even when i do i may not be in the headspace for it hellofresh helps eliminate those stressors while still allowing us to feel like we're eating like royalty which is pretty nice hellofresh offers 50 menu and market items to choose from every week including vegetarian calorie smart and gourmet options providing plenty of variety the weekly delivery helps you cut back on prep time and the cleanup afterwards and even has a wide variety of 20 minutes meals for those who really need to move fast you know the no time to cook i have a a meeting in like half an hour kind of people the pre-packaged ingredients means that most of the hard part is done for you with you just doing a little chopping a little cooking and a lot of eating plus you get things pre-portioned so no more making meals for tin when you mean to make a meal for two my wife and i really enjoyed trying new things with some of these and discovering new meals that we'll probably make regularly now and you get to keep the recipes if you're struggling to cook your way through the holidays head on over to hellofresh.com and use code eposvox14 for up to 14 free meals and three free gifts it's worth it even as a picky eater i wasn't really sure about trying this kind of thing but the recipes even call for situations where you could not include specific ingredients if you don't prefer them and you get to pick the kind of meals you want in the first place again that's hellofresh.com and code eposvox14 for up to 14 free meals plus three free gifts happy eating and of course if you're streaming this from the xbox then you mostly get to continue as normal hook your xbox up to your capture card and run as normal again the same issues of it being a first person shooter if you're not used to streaming those for some reason then we'll still apply but otherwise you're mostly good to go it's you don't have performance concerns from any game to game or what have you so pretty nice there i do like that you get full you get field of view tweaking it has ultrawide support all that jazz so gonna be a pretty awesome season for games really stinks for battlefield that it launched literally like right as battlefield was dropping and having server issues i think that's going to be a very interesting dynamic there i'm stoked that we get access to it early and that they felt so confident in like releasing it in this state versus you know needing to continue patching it up and i am super stoked to see what the campaign has in store for us come december 8th thank you so much for watching thank you so much for your support new halo is always just like a field day for me i'm super stoked i'm going to be grinding this out even though i do need to make videos for this week i hope you enjoyed let me know what your experiences are over on our discord server discord gg slash sheep's box hit the like button and remember be kind rewindmicrosoft in 343 industries have done it they released halo early kind of during the 20th anniversary xbox live stream today well the day before as you're probably watching this xbox showed a lot of cool stuff and we got some halo news including a teaser for the upcoming halo tv show that will be on paramount plus apparently as well as an announcement that the halo infinite multiplayer which is technically a beta until the official release date of december 8th is ready to go and playable for free on xbox and pc via game pass or steam which is really cool there were some quirks with the initial launcher that was giving people blue screens on both their xbox and pc which was pretty wild but that has mostly been fixed so just restart your system and start the download all over again it feels solid it looks absolutely beautiful but how does it stream before we go too far i did want to let you know that for backing track our stream safe video safe royalty free rock and metal music we do have a halo album coming we were trying to keep this a secret up to the official release date but since they're dropping it early i'm teasing it early we have an album called forerunner which is of course gonna be halo themed and inspired and some of the background music is being used in this video it's not done yet it will be released hopefully in time for the full release of halo infinite but i am super stoked for that and if you're looking for more music in the meantime we did just drop versus two the sequel to my favorite backing track album so far this past week so you can check it out at the links below let's jump into some game performance details first so first and foremost i feel like the game runs better than the than it did during the flight but still nowhere near as good as i'd like the game seems to run like but at least on nvidia i'm using for my specific build i'm using an rtx 3090 and a 10900k and nearing the flights i tested on rtx 3080 as well it is tough for me to get a solid frame rate at 1440p on the higher graphical settings uh i have seen reports that it's running great on amd gpus so your mileage may vary there uh the game itself is very gpu heavy not so cpu heavy which is advantageous for streaming as we'll talk about in a moment in terms of optimizing your in-game settings because it's gonna be so hard to hit your target frame rates i would definitely recommend messing with the frame rate limiter to set the minimum of 60 and the maximum to some multiple of 60 and not just running completely uncapped or targeting a higher refresh rate 120 is probably going to be your best bet at higher resolutions for now and if you're streaming you may even want to lower it lower than that and streaming i would recommend depending depending on your gpu running high or even medium settings instead of ultra of course we do have a graphic setting that made a big difference in performance for me which we'll talk about in a moment but do keep in mind when you're lowing graphic settings while of course it does make the game look less pleasing to you the lower detail the lower resolution textures the simpler textures the less graphics effects on screen does actually compress better for your stream so that's worth keeping in mind some settings to play with to try to impact your performance ambient occlusion anti-aliasing reflections lighting and shadow quality are all things you can tweak and tone down on their own without affecting the overall image quality and they can make a small difference i still feel like the game is not super optimized at the moment i don't know that it will make a huge difference for you you may have to lower the render resolution scale and that is something that i think made a huge difference for me because tweaking all these settings like i was able to claim back like one or two fps on average because it still flickers back and forth running at 1440p on high on my 3090 i was averaging 120 ish fps but it was flickering between like 110 115 and 120 kinda 117-120 range was what was happening quite a bit however dropping down to even just 90 resolution scale for the render resolution which is still 90 of 1440p pretty much not noticeable unless you're deliberately av testing or pixel peeping seems to get me a locked 120fps at least on the smaller 4v4 modes and seems to have improved my performance greatly on the big team battle modes so that's worth keeping in mind and then i do recommend checking the limit defocused frame rate to improve your alt tabbing or switching between uh obs and your game and things like that when you're streaming it'll make a huge difference for those render lag spikes when you're doing that getting into capture and streaming talk i did want to note that this game halo infinite does not have a full screen mode this was something that was a thing in the flights and drove me nuts and i had just assumed was a quirk of the flights and that they would add it back in but here we are still in beta but you know with a proper release and there is still no full screen mode you have borderless full screen or windowed this causes some issues for how the game renders on your screen shadow plays frame rate counter doesn't work and you have to enable desktop capture mode for shadow play which may mean if you're on a multi-monitor setup that is capturing your second monitor instead of your game because shadowplay likes the deer pop of that thankfully the game capture source in obs studio still works fine with this game so that's pretty awesome there do prepare for a frame rate impact on your gameplay when you open obs and start streaming with it i was running again an average of 120ish fps without obs and depending on the settings i was using with obs open i was going anywhere from 80 to 100 fps on average instead of that 120. so you will be taking that hit there unless you would want to drop all the way down to 60 and you're just gonna have to deal with it i ran my stream test with obs version 27.1.3 and streamed at 1080p 60 at eight megabits per second i'm using windows 11 and the latest nvidia game ready drivers cpu encoding because this game is very gpu heavy and not super cpu heavy at all cpu coding was actually a breeze and on my cpu obviously you got to scale it down based on yours but on my cpu cpu encoding was perfectly fine up to medium slow is not suitable for real time doesn't work in real time don't try it this is a good thing for amd users because if the game runs better on amd gpus then you're better off than the rest of us other than the fact that amd's video encoder really sucks for streaming so you can still use cpu encoding and probably be fine gpu encoding is fine as well and gets you a little bit higher in game frame rates but it will vary depending on your card and how stressed your particular card is as we kind of scale down to the 30 60s the 20 50 or not 20 20 60s and 1050 ti's as a lot of you all have noted that at least in the flights the performance wasn't great already so you will have to scale this a little bit accordingly but i do recommend trying cpu encoding first as you're going to get the least impact on your overall gpu usage however like i said i did get higher frame rates encoding with invinc even if there were some little quirks to it i will say those of you who have been on a long-running windows 10 installation will probably still need to run obs as administrator to help fight render lag competing with the game because it is that gpu heavy thankfully even at the high settings like it's not using a ton of vram so if you have a higher vram count card you're a little bit advantageous there in terms of media decoding and things like that uh however if you're running windows 11 you probably don't need to run obs as administrator as the default hacks or hardware accelerated graphics scheduler i think is the shortcut handles effectively what running obs as admin does and on windows 11 it seems to perform a lot better than it did on windows 10 for me even with an updated version of windows 10 but your mileage may very very definitely do some tests first and see which one is the way to go for you in terms of game performance based on streaming i was averaging again 115 120 fps without obs open when encoding with x264 i was holding about 90 to 99 fps so a fairly significant hit however i did not suffer any again i'm on a higher end cpu so it will scale based on your performance but because it's so gpu heavy versus cpu heavy the difference between x 264 fast medium and faster there was no significant like difference in performance impact on my game between those encoder settings so i was still holding 90 to 99 regardless of whether i was on fast or fast or medium which is kind of nice however performs a little bit more smoothly here at least on 20 and 30 series cards holding an average of 100 to 110 fps depending on your settings of course now this was all specifically with just capturing the game capture which is not super representative of someone who's streaming mainly just recording if you are streaming uh loading up a layout and things like that it's still mostly fine however you do take a higher performance hit to your actual game performance dropping me down to about 80 or 90 fps setting up my epos os version of the nerd or die stream os layout uh and that's with both inbink and x264 uh so worth keeping in mind but also keep in mind that this is a first person shooter it's a fast-paced game fluidity of your frame rate is going to matter most the viewers versus image quality on your you know still images or whatever however consider simpler scene layouts and fewer graphics on screen with this kind of game if you want to improve your overall quality as the more you have on screen the more the compressor struggles to compress everything and the worse your game will look but again fluidity is most important you know what else is important our sponsor and paying the bills so i can continue to make these videos for you been sharing my cooking experiments and progress with you all all year on discord and twitter showing my grill adventures and fancy meals my wife and i have been making inside while i'm not starting a cooking channel anytime soon despite the requests it has been fun but can i be real with you for a sec i love cooking and learning to cook and making something delicious that really gives you that feeling of just when you're done but i actually hate what comes for planning and prepping for meals as a new dad time is slim nights are hectic and i i rarely feel like i have the time to just sit down and actually plan out or prepare for the meals that i want to make during the week and even when i do i may not be in the headspace for it hellofresh helps eliminate those stressors while still allowing us to feel like we're eating like royalty which is pretty nice hellofresh offers 50 menu and market items to choose from every week including vegetarian calorie smart and gourmet options providing plenty of variety the weekly delivery helps you cut back on prep time and the cleanup afterwards and even has a wide variety of 20 minutes meals for those who really need to move fast you know the no time to cook i have a a meeting in like half an hour kind of people the pre-packaged ingredients means that most of the hard part is done for you with you just doing a little chopping a little cooking and a lot of eating plus you get things pre-portioned so no more making meals for tin when you mean to make a meal for two my wife and i really enjoyed trying new things with some of these and discovering new meals that we'll probably make regularly now and you get to keep the recipes if you're struggling to cook your way through the holidays head on over to hellofresh.com and use code eposvox14 for up to 14 free meals and three free gifts it's worth it even as a picky eater i wasn't really sure about trying this kind of thing but the recipes even call for situations where you could not include specific ingredients if you don't prefer them and you get to pick the kind of meals you want in the first place again that's hellofresh.com and code eposvox14 for up to 14 free meals plus three free gifts happy eating and of course if you're streaming this from the xbox then you mostly get to continue as normal hook your xbox up to your capture card and run as normal again the same issues of it being a first person shooter if you're not used to streaming those for some reason then we'll still apply but otherwise you're mostly good to go it's you don't have performance concerns from any game to game or what have you so pretty nice there i do like that you get full you get field of view tweaking it has ultrawide support all that jazz so gonna be a pretty awesome season for games really stinks for battlefield that it launched literally like right as battlefield was dropping and having server issues i think that's going to be a very interesting dynamic there i'm stoked that we get access to it early and that they felt so confident in like releasing it in this state versus you know needing to continue patching it up and i am super stoked to see what the campaign has in store for us come december 8th thank you so much for watching thank you so much for your support new halo is always just like a field day for me i'm super stoked i'm going to be grinding this out even though i do need to make videos for this week i hope you enjoyed let me know what your experiences are over on our discord server discord gg slash sheep's box hit the like button and remember be kind rewind\n"