So you’re a seasoned PC gamer wondering how to make your gaming experience more social. But without inviting people into your house. Then you get the utterly unique and one-of-a-kind idea to start streaming your gameplay.
You sprang into action preparing to show your battle station off to the world but what kind of setup do you need to pull this off well. Hey guys, it shouldn’t be surprising, but an upper range gaming PC is often an excellent choice for streaming. But there are Hardware considerations for streaming.
That is a little bit different typically gaming setups are building around the GPU with your graphics card often being the deciding factor in how beautiful your games will look as long as the rest of your rig meets.
Streaming your CPU:
Some minimum threshold but for streaming your CPU can determine. How your gameplay looks to your viewers be they on Twitch or another streaming platform.
But why is this I mean we’re still talking about how to get the best graphical quality right well remember that the work of rendering the game. That is your graphics card has already done the act of actually creating the image. It’s been your CPU that takes that rendered image and transcodes it into a video format.
That can be quickly sent over the internet and displayed by your viewer’s web browsers and if you’ve ever edited video regularly. You’ll probably already know that having a more powerful CPU typically makes video encoding a much easier job.
Now since transcoding is easily split amongst multiple CPU cores oh, by the way, don’t forget you still have to run the game – it is to your advantage to get a CPU with more cores and more threads especially. If, you want to stream at 1080p 60fps instead of 720p though.
It should be noted that as with anything there is a point of diminishing returns and an 18 core processor might not be worth the extra price if you want a specific recommendation.
A new six-core Core i7 or more or AMD rising seven processor or better in your gaming rig should make it a competent streaming machine.
Some streamers though decide to go a step further and use a second PC to handle all the streaming tasks using their first rig strictly for actual gaming. It can especially make sense if you already have an older tower lying around.
Stream CPU intensive games:
Because it’s a great way to stream CPU intensive games like Starcraft or total war without being concerned. That your gameplay or your stream quality will suffer as a result and one of the reasons this approach is so popular is that your streaming PC doesn’t have to be anything.
Super fancy you might not even need a dedicated graphics card you will need a good CPU. But because it’s going to be handling streaming only, you can probably get away with a more basic fork or four thread processor. Just make sure that you close all your background programs and have only what you need to stream up and to run.
Dedicated streaming PC:
If, you’re running into trouble the other thing. What you’ll need for your dedicated streaming PC is a way to capture the video output from your gaming machine and deliver it to the software.
That will encode and transmit your stream along with any overlays and transitions. That you desire for PC gamers, this can be done over your local network using the NV NC Hardware encoding engine.
Behind Nvidia, shadowplay feature to send up to a 60 megabit stream of the game over. Ethernet to your secondary box where CPU encoding will turn it into a high quality 5.5 megabit Stream compatible with Twitch TV.
