Keep an eye out for lag, dropped frames, audio cut-outs, and screen tearing. If you are already a streamer with a large fan base, go live through a dashboard such as YouTube studio so you can test the new elements without going public. If so, you can go live and end streams without notifying any viewers and test each encoder as you go. Hopefully, you are reading this at the start of your streaming journey. The best way of choosing the best encoder for you and your streams is through trial and error. If your CPU or GPU percentages are persistently above 95% or even maxing out at 100%, it is overloaded, and the encoding needs to be done elsewhere.

When your encoder overloads, it becomes impossible for your system to process the video and audio data, so your stream will just stop! You can check the status of your CPU and GPU load during your OBS session by going to your Task Manager or downloading a system monitor software such as GPU-Z. Picking the wrong encoder will result in choppy, laggy, and crashing streams. This is what hardware encoding allows you to do.

What if you could share the load of the rendering across your system and send the rendering process to your GPU instead of your CPU? Your CPU is already handling standard system processes plus other open applications, so sending the rendering encoding to your GPU will free up a lot of space on your CPU. Rendering video takes up a lot of CPU, and for some older systems, it might be too much and cause a crash. This is because the encoding of that information is an intensive process, and the software alone does not have the memory requirements to perform the action.įor example, say you are rendering a video in Premiere Pro. In this case, particular data must be encoded by a specific hardware part of your computer, usually your processor or graphics card. Usually, users will turn a blind eye to encoding settings because they seem complicated, but knowing exactly what that setting does can improve the user experience.Įssentially, hardware encoding refers to the processing of data on your system. Hardware encoding is a term that you will see dotted around computers in general, not only in OBS Studio.

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