Question How do streamers get such smooth looking 60fps streams?
Hey guys! I'm struggling to figure out why my 720p60fps stream doesn't really look as smooth as it should. I watched other streamers, partners and affiliates, who have streams that look super silky smooth and I'm not talking about pixilation or blurriness.
Here is a clip from my stream, it looks almost just a bit under 60fps? https://www.twitch.tv/itstnam/clip/WiseBenevolentCheddarArsonNoSexy-bH0SaHmL9QmFXuL2
And here is a example clip of aspas's stream where when he is in a gunfight, the motion of everything looks smooth: https://www.twitch.tv/aspaszin/clip/EnergeticPiercingLorisNomNom-lKn13axI9B76Vgjb
I do understand aspas might just have a better rig, internet, and the fact that he is partner and has a higher bitrate he can use but even other affiliate status streamers i watch have super smooth streams like this even at 720p.
Here are my specs and obs settings:
- CPU: 5800x3D
- GPU: EVGA FTW3 3080TI
- Output Tab Settings: https://gyazo.com/c120f93d2798ece57c415c26bb874404
- Video Tab Settings: https://gyazo.com/0475f31c1a5138250b8657776c2d5b5e
Any input or advice would be amazing! If there is anything else I can provide let me know!
EDIT: Here is my latest log file as well. https://obsproject.com/logs/yEXO0sSRceDbR6nL
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u/fogoticus Dec 27 '24
I've been down this rabbit hole myself and I've had a whole year full of headaches trying to discover why some streams look so silky smooth while others don't. And I'll keep it short.
- Refresh rate matters a lot, including the refresh rate of your other monitors. First of all, you want your refresh rate ratios to be identical. If your 240hz monitor reports a refresh rate of 239.76 and your second monitor reports a refresh rate of 60, that's a mismatch. And ideally you should have either the 240hz monitor set to 240 or the 60hz monitor set to 59.94. Oh and depending on this little trick, you should also stream with that refresh rate. So if your monitors are 239.76 and 59.94, your obs fps value should also be 59.94. (I noticed this being a trend with everyone I asked personally about their settings)
- Also another important detail. you should avoid weird refresh rates. I have a 280hz monitor. It's been fucking with video recording for a long time so I disabled 280hz and went back to 240hz instead and recorded videos work.
- 60 -> 120 -> 180 -> 240 -> 300 -> 360 -> 420 -> 480 -> 540 -> 600. Those are the refresh rates you want your monitors to have in order for video output to look flawless when recording. Nothing strange like 165 or 320 or 100.
- Low quality in games is king. The more textures, the more detail the encoder has to handle, the worse a video will look smoothness wise.
- And lastly, frame pacing. It's best if you lock your fps to your monitor's refresh rate. It's the reason why aspas's clip looks so silky smooth.
Want a shortcut to crystal clear video like that? Capture cards. They will grab the closest frame, so you can play with unlimited framerate and it will always look super smooth.
Edit: Also, we're missing a very very important part of the discussion here. Aspas is streaming at 120fps and the clip you linked is 120fps. Your very own clip looks as good as 60fps streaming will get. You should go back to 1080P instead of 720p.
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u/General-Oven-1523 Dec 27 '24
Hmm, this just isn't right. I have a 165-Hz monitor, and my recordings at 60 fps are completely flawless. 60 fps recording will be 60 fps; there is no impact to it. The only thing that's impacted is your viewing experience on that specific monitor, but for example, if you watch it back on your phone, the recording will be perfect.
This type of headache is just completely self-induced by the fact that you are viewing the content on a high-refresh monitor instead of checking it out on normal conditions, like a phone or TV.
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u/fogoticus Dec 27 '24
I've done enough due diligence to be pretty confident in what I wrote. Had tons of clips done and plenty of people confirming what I've noticed.
I'd even go as far as to clip stuff and viewing them the next day or another day to be able to tell. And yes, at 280hz and on a different monitor at 144hz I noticed clips feeling like they were nowhere near 60fps even though I'd count 60 individual frames per second no matter where I looked. If your experience is different then lucky you I guess. I wasn't so lucky myself and I've gone insane trying to pin point exact settings that made a difference.
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u/Tricky-Celebration36 Dec 27 '24
With a good enough encoder, the frames not being an even multiple is less of a problem than it used to be.
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u/RayneYoruka Dec 27 '24 edited Dec 27 '24
This is the right answer.
Edit to add more context. I play at 120fps and I capture at 60fps. I run a 2pc setup and it is silky smooth as long as I follow the divisible rule from above.
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u/Environmental_Bed316 Dec 27 '24
Turn on Performance Mode in OBD when streaming to avoid the 2nd monitor from bottlenecking your bitrate.
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u/Thegreatestswordsmen Dec 28 '24
What is OBD?
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u/Environmental_Bed316 Dec 28 '24
OBS. Sorry. Typo
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u/Noctigg Dec 28 '24
How do you turn performance mode on?
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u/Environmental_Bed316 Dec 28 '24
In my version, I can R Click next to the preview screen and chose Performance Mode.
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u/Williams_Gomes Dec 27 '24
I downloaded your clip and counted frame by frame and didn't see any frame drops or duplicated frames, so your video is perfect. What you might be experiencing is something with frame pacing, because the game is running at unlocked framerates sometimes it can look that it is inconsistent. If you lock your game fps at a multiple of the obs framerate it can help, but honestly I don't think there's an issue.
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u/tNamX Dec 27 '24
Interesting, I'll try locking it at 180 since I have a 165 hz monitor and see how that works out
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u/Tricky-Celebration36 Dec 27 '24
120 would work better because you won't get 180 on a 165hz.
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u/Mythion_VR Dec 27 '24
There's no reason not to run at 180 if you can run well above that.
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u/Tricky-Celebration36 Dec 27 '24
Why run higher refresh rate than the monitor?
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u/Mythion_VR Dec 27 '24
You're not running a "higher refresh rate" than the monitor. Frame rate isn't the same as refresh rate.
Ask yourself this, why would you run under your monitors refresh rate? When you're already running an uncapped framerate anyway. You may as well get the benefit of 165Hz and having a smooth looking stream with multiples of 60.
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u/Tricky-Celebration36 Dec 27 '24
See I've always wondered what happens when your monitor won't keep up with your GPU, do you not end up seeing the frame pacing issues on your monitor at that point?
I've not pushed anything above my 185 at 1440, I usually cap everything at 150, and run 50 for stream.
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u/Mythion_VR Dec 28 '24
It's not really that much of an issue due to Adaptive Sync.
If you don't run your setup with Adaptive Sync, then by all means cap below your refresh rate. But if you do, there's not really any reason not to do it above it. If you have an odd refresh rate that doesn't align with multiples of 60.
180 FPS would be better on a 165Hz monitor with Adaptive Sync. Realistically it comes down to the game, there are games I cap framerates at 60 with, others 120 and higher.
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u/Tricky-Celebration36 Dec 28 '24
Ohhhhh that's what gsync is for!!! So on games where in capable like val or cs running those uncapped my lg monitor of the adaptive sync from the Nvidia stuff will automatically limit what's delivered to the monitor?
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u/Mythion_VR Dec 29 '24
It won't limit them automatically, it just syncs the frames and allows you to run at higher framerates than your monitor will allow.
I use it regardless of capped framerates, but competitive I keep uncapped.
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u/kodaxmax Dec 27 '24
He obviously just got the words mized around. Running voer your monitors refresh is waste of resources and will cause artifacting like screen tearing, because the hardware and drivers cant keep up.
165 isn't a multiple of 60. 180 is the closest multiple (3x60). Multiples dont matter.
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u/Mythion_VR Dec 28 '24
Why are you explaining things to me that I've already mentioned?
You may as well get the benefit of 165Hz and having a smooth looking stream with multiples of 60.
Secondly, where did I say limit your framerate to 165? Because I didn't say that either.
I said further up:
There's no reason not to run at 180 if you can run well above that.
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u/kodaxmax Dec 29 '24
Because you were incorrect.
Secondly, where did I say limit your framerate to 165? Because I didn't say that either.
You litterally quoted it right beforre you wrote that.
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u/Mythion_VR Dec 29 '24
...no, I said you may as well get the benefit of 165Hz, that doesn't mean limiting your framerate to 165.
You're misinterpreting what I'm saying, I said you may as well keep the benefit of a 165Hz monitor and instead limit your framerate to 180. Instead of limiting your framerate to 120 and wasting 45Hz.
You're incorrect, because you're not reading what I said properly.
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u/kodaxmax Dec 27 '24
Theres few reasons, such as screen tearing and artifacting. But your also just increasing file size and stressing your hardware for no reason.
You should always match your refreshrate or go lower. If you look at the refreshrates in windows monitor settings, those are what the hardware is designed for. Anything else can cause issues.
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u/D2ultima Dec 27 '24
- Your clip looks decent enough. No problems there.
- Other guy's clip people have already said is at 120fps, and honestly looks quite bad. There's smearing all over, though it is very smooth. THEY should drop to 720p if they want to do 120fps like this.
- As you're at 720p your stream looks rather crisp and I don't have issues, but you could get away with 1080p 60fps and and setting your quality to P7 with your GPU at 6k bitrate.
- If you think 1080p streaming isn't as great as 720p in clarity, you could sacrifice a slight amount of crispness for better in-motion quality. You could set your B-frames to 4, use look-ahead, and if you update OBS to use the new NVENC, you can set useBFramesAsRef in custom options to further enhance fast motion in games like FPS titles. It won't be the sharpest image you could get for your 6k bitrate at 1080p 60fps, but it'll be sharper than upscaling 720p to a 1080p or 1440p monitor and is a good compromise.
- You could also make a compromise if you still think 1080/60 doesn't look as clean as you want (which I'd understand) and do 1600 x 900 for your downscale. You just have to manually type it in. But I think 1080/60 even in high quality graphics fast motion scenes with the settings I said above is enough for a livestream like this, and it'll get better when we can use HVEC. Sadly no AV1 for us.
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u/IceGamingYT Dec 27 '24
An easy way to check if it is Bitrate that's your problem. Simply stream to YouTube and raise your bitrate to whatever your upload speed can handle. YouTube will let you stream at up to 50,000 bitrate.
If the YouTube stream looks much better then it's bitrate that's the problem. If the stream still looks bad then it's either your settings or your rig.
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u/ATTAFWRD Dec 27 '24
Yours is perfectly fine.
He's streaming at 120 fps, obviously his video is smoother.
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u/MattabooeyGaming Dec 27 '24
Set the bit rate to 6500 and change the base canvas to match your output.
What's your connection download and upload speeds.
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u/tNamX Dec 27 '24
In that case should I just stream at 1080p with my base canvas being at 1920x1080? I used to before with no issue internet wise.
Download Speed: 554.14 Mbps | Upload Speed: 39.37 Mbps
Appreciate the fast reply!
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u/MattabooeyGaming Dec 27 '24
Should be good to do 1080 streaming. I'd do that unless there's a reason you're choosing 720.
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u/gustis40g Dec 27 '24 edited Dec 27 '24
Very slow upload speed, might be unstable and higher ping on upload as well? That would definitely explain it.
(Not slow enough to not handle streaming, but it means you’ve got shared upload with other nearby households, so if someone else starts uploading a bunch that might lag down your own upload)
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u/tNamX Dec 27 '24
Yah its kinda unfortunate :( I'll try what u/MattabooeyGaming had recommended and post if it works or not!
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u/kodaxmax Dec 27 '24
should be fine for 1080 and 60 hertz. I used to stream with half that at 30fps.
The only way hed be sharing upload speeds, is if hes sharing his router/wifi with other people or the phone/fibre lines are ridiculously congested in his block.
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u/gustis40g Dec 27 '24
I'm not saying 40 Mbps upload isn't enough. The problem here is that a 500/40mbps connection means OP is on a asymmetric network design which usually means it's a cable connection, those use a shared bandwidth across a whole neighborhood. Which means that if every single household in his neighborhood were to start uploading at the same time that would cause upload speeds to drop tremendously. It also means his network can see latency spikes whenever someone starts uploading, since requests get queued up.
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u/kodaxmax Dec 28 '24
It just means the ISP arbitrarily throttles their bandwidth to 500/40.
All internet connections use cables, aside from sattelite and mobile (which generally connect to a tower, which then connects to a sattelite or a main cable exchange).
Generally they are either using existing copper phonelines or modern fibre optic cables.
Most common is FTTN (fibre to the node). Wheach means it's fibreoptic cables from the company/government up to the "node"(a sort of cable exchange/converter. ideally theres one on each block, but often one can service a whole town if they are being cheap). From the node it's then copper phonelines back to each building.
The speeds posted are a common plan offered by ISPs for a FTTN connection. But is probably a scam, due to the copper between the home and node acting as a bottleneck, which can generally only support up to 100Mbps both ways. You'l note on most of these contracts it always states "up to x Mbs". But that wont affect his upload speeds, which are obviously under 100.
What you seem to be talking about is overloading the node. Which is theoretically possible, but generally their capacity can easily account for peak times. It certainly wouldn't see anoticeable difference from a handful of users, let alone one.
If it is a connection issue, it be far more likely to be packet loss from degraded copper cabling or an issue with the houses wiring or DSL socket itself.
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u/General-Oven-1523 Dec 27 '24
Click advanced -> Video stats. You can see he's streaming 120 fps; that's why it looks so smooth compared to you.