How to Choose a GPU for OBS Studio?

Advanced streamers are always on the lookout for better ways to improve their stream quality and offer their viewers an enhanced viewing experience. System resources play a vital role in the performance of your streaming software. The processor and storage systems are always discussed for the installation of any streaming software. However, graphic cards also require a fair share of your thought to ensure OBS Studio delivers a lag-free performance while recording and live broadcasting high-resolution videos and gameplay.

OBS Studio – What Is it and How Does it Work?

Open Broadcaster Software Studio, or OBS Studio, is widely used free and open-source streaming software for 1920 x 1080 Full HD streaming, gameplay recording, and video production. The software offers extensive features for scene composition, sound effects, quality enhancement, and real-time streaming on major platforms like Twitch, YouTube, YouTube Gaming, Facebook, and Twitter/Periscope. The whole range of OBS features is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux users. OBS gathers raw input provided by your video and audio capture devices and turns it into a stream, which can be then sent to a streaming service using an internet connection.

Which GPU Is Ideal for OBS Studio?

As per the system requirements stated by OBS, you will need an OpenGL 3.3 compatible GPU for multimedia handling on a Mac system. If you are a Windows user, your PC must have a graphics card with support for DirectX 10.1 to carry out multimedia activities. Similarly, to live stream from your Linux system, you will need a graphics card compatible with OpenGL 3.3 with an additional piece of software called FFmpeg. FFmpeg is a free and open-source software package for processing multimedia files such as images, audio, and video.

Can You Use OBS Software without a GPU?

OBS is vastly known for its flexibility and versatility. It gives you multiple options to decide which piece of hardware shall render your video. You can select NVENC (NVIDIA Encoder) or AMF from the output settings of OBS Studio as an encoder to set your Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) as the multimedia handling unit. In another case, you can also choose x264, which allows you to use your Central Processing Unit (CPU) for multimedia activities. It means, it is technically possible to use OBS Studio without a GPU, but it may put extra load on your PC, resulting in frustrating lags and a frozen screen.

How Does a Dedicated GPU Work?

The use of a dedicated GPU to carry out multimedia operations results in a noticeable impact on the quality of your streams and the performance of your streaming software. The right OBS settings reduce the load on your CPU resources and enable you to record and stream your videos at the best possible quality.

Boost Your Stream Quality with Apps4Rent

Dropped frames and frozen images are the worst nightmares for streamers. While there are rigs and setups for high-quality streaming, they are either too expensive or too inflexible. In order to ensure your videos are rendered seamlessly, you must think about shifting your workload to the cloud. Apps4Rent offers you OBS Studio hosting services empowered by state-of-the-art technology so you can enjoy a groundbreaking performance from your software. We use NVIDIA GPU on our servers and provide HDX-enabled Citrix Virtual Desktops, eliminating all the concerns related to resource-intensive multimedia handling. Alternatively, we can host the solution on Azure for professional-level streaming. Contact our cloud technology experts, available 24/7 via phone, chat, and email for hosting plan inquiries.