streaming and CPU bottlenecking

[windfish]

So i am trying to stream some League of Legends.

At first i tried to stream a few months ago and i had a
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814162078 (nvidia 550ti)

It ran at <5fps at 1920x1080 and then 5-10 fps in 1280x720

So i gave up until i got a new video card.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814125423 (Nvidia 670)

I opened up the streaming program (Xsplit) And i started it for League and noticed that i had the same exact issue.

This made me think that it is most likely my CPU bottlenecking my computer.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...2E16819103851R (AMD Phenom || X6 2.8ghz OCed to 3.1ghz)

Just wanted to see if anyone knew anything differant or anything to possibly fix it. All Drivers are up to date and my network connection is fine. I have 16g of DDR3 ram and a 630w PSU.

If you need any more information just ask.

[Deleted]

Unfortunately, no, You will more than likely need to upgrade your CPU.

The only thing I can think of to suggest is...

try another xsplit preset (lowest CPU useage)
use game source (Less cpu intensive) or dxtory for capture.
lower your rendering resolution. most people don't watch streams fullscreen.
Turn off every unneeded program while streaming.
Experiment with Aero on and off
Play in fullscreen mode (needs gamesource for this but you use a LOT less CPU in most games)

Outside of that, a CPU upgrade is in order, I'd recommend an i7 for streaming personally, I use that to stream WoW in 1080p occasionally.

[phred754]

Do you have an ssd? If you have a single hdd and are gaming and writing your stream files to it, there is your bottlneck.

[windfish]

Alright, Yeah this is my motherboard

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131767

It has an AM3+ socket and i do not know of any I7's that fit that socket, but i did see this

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819106009

I'm going to read into this and see how well it does.

---------- Post added 2012-11-27 at 11:08 PM ----------

yes, i am using only using an hdd sadly atm. I am planning on getting a few things coming up this xmas with the money ill be getting. I know i should put Win7 on the ssd, but should i set it to write my stream files to it also?

[phred754]

you can write to the ssd, or as a cheap fix until then get yourself another small hdd. use one hdd only to write the stream files to, its makes a huge difference in streaming. i guarantee you will get better results doing that than upgrading to a new amd processor. amd is shit right now and nothing they make is going to be much better than what you already have

[theprodigal]

Assuming you are on a stable internet connection, then streaming software does in fact use more cores so a 6 core AMD cpu would be ok. It does look like other problems are occurring than just cpu being a bit slow, the Fx-8350 would be the best cpu for your board, assuming you update the bios. Afaik currently it is not far behind the i7 in multithreaded applications but faulters a bit on single threaded meaning while you wouldn't necessarily get the same performance as say an i5-3570k you would take less of a performance hit upon activating the streaming client and capturing client.

Check newegg, while the Fx-8350 is a $200 cpu it is the best upgrade you can attain without further swapping your motherboard, and it is a substantial upgrade.

[Deleted]

Pretty sure that unless you're recording a copy of your stream for later, your HDD has no effect on your FPS.

[theprodigal]

Pretty sure that unless you're recording a copy of your stream for later, your HDD has no effect on your FPS.

You are not sure at all, because that is completely incorrect. The HDD still is being used to cache the data while it doesnt take the performance hit of writing everything for later use it in fact does have a lot to do w/ streaming, and a slower mechanical would be not so great. I would not take an SSD and put it in the machine for anything to do w/ streaming, overwrite an SSD and kill it for nothing.

[Deleted]

I could stream using xsplit on LoL with mostly max settings on a 2500k @ 4.5ghz, a standard 7200rpm HDD and R6870. my main bottleneck was my internet - I believe it was only 1mbs up. a 670 is definitely enough to stream, so if it's still not working it's probably either an xsplit settings or CPU issue. never really AMD so I'm not sure how capable they are of streaming.

[windfish]

Yeah i have 3.5 mbps up, i could stream fine on my laptop which has a 660m and an i7 Quad core @2.33ghz wireless connection. My desktop is wired and has a 670, i'll probably use some christmas money towards a new processor or maybe even a new processor and Motherboard depending on how much i get and the differance it makes.

I'll do some researching, thanks for all the help. If anything else pops up please reply.

---------- Post added 2012-11-28 at 07:19 PM ----------

ok never mind, i tested my upload speed and it's apparently barely 1mbps... i think i found the issue. But it's weird because i have 20 mbps dl.

[Faithh]

Try Dxtory instead of any recordingsoftware. Dxtory allows you to tweak a lot and recognizes up to 8 cores which can be changed as well.

You might try to figure out how many cores LoL uses and which ones it's using and try to leave the other cores to DXtory.

Just a tip, setting affinity in taskmanager to each app.

Your CPU is really moaning for a higher overclock.

HDD doesn't have anything to do now with streaming if you stream on twitch. I think twitch works like this, you stream it to their server and they stream it to the watchers, so you basically only send the data to a server.

Dxtory allows you to use a lot of video codecs and changing the quality etc. Some video codecs are more bandwidth hungry than others. Lagarith lossless codec is really awesome. http://lags.leetcode.net/codec.html

Check this video out how to set Dxtory as recording software and streaming with xplit -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2AzyW4qz0o

[yurano]

You are not sure at all, because that is completely incorrect. The HDD still is being used to cache the data while it doesnt take the performance hit of writing everything for later use it in fact does have a lot to do w/ streaming, and a slower mechanical would be not so great. I would not take an SSD and put it in the machine for anything to do w/ streaming, overwrite an SSD and kill it for nothing.

Why would a program choose to cache data on disk instead of in RAM?

[windfish]

Yeah i have noticed that it only affects my HDD if i'm also recording to local as well as streaming. but that would just be silly, Twitch keeps every stream saved anyway.

[Faithh]

Yeah i have noticed that it only affects my HDD if i'm also recording to local as well as streaming. but that would just be silly, Twitch keeps every stream saved anyway.

Well Fraps if you have this at full size, recording for 100seconds it was soaking 4.3GB. The faster the HDD is, the higher the quality will be and the file will be bigger.

For a normal HDD with average 100MB/s write speed, fraps records at 260000Kbps. SSD's will allow to go much higher, I guess 600000Kbps? I still remember recording fraps at fullsize on my 2nd SSD which had 120GB space, the SSD was full in 2-3minutes orsomething >.<

How higher the Kbps -> the better the quality and the file will be bigger.

If you stream like that, you're really going to have major problems and indeed the HDD causes this but this isn't the only "bottleneck" but your uploadspeed will also be a bottleneck.

What I'm trying to say is, Fraps uses a junk codec and you can't tweak it more.

Dxtory would allow you to record at 1000Kbps (which you can change to whatever you like) which is just nothing for your HDD at all neither for your uploadspeed for twitch. Also Dxtory is less laggy than Fraps due to being better multithreaded.

As I said before dxtory allows to use w/e codec you want, but some codecs have a better algoritm which just means that they can provide the same quality at a lower bitrate (Kbps).

[Deleted]

You are not sure at all, because that is completely incorrect. The HDD still is being used to cache the data while it doesnt take the performance hit of writing everything for later use it in fact does have a lot to do w/ streaming, and a slower mechanical would be not so great. I would not take an SSD and put it in the machine for anything to do w/ streaming, overwrite an SSD and kill it for nothing.

Just tested this so I could be sure once and for all, Unless you are locally recording the stream, your hard drive has NOTHING to do with streaming.

[windfish]

Well Fraps if you have this at full size, recording for 100seconds it was soaking 4.3GB. The faster the HDD is, the higher the quality will be and the file will be bigger.

For a normal HDD with average 100MB/s write speed, fraps records at 260000Kbps. SSD's will allow to go much higher, I guess 600000Kbps? I still remember recording fraps at fullsize on my 2nd SSD which had 120GB space, the SSD was full in 2-3minutes orsomething >.<

How higher the Kbps -> the better the quality and the file will be bigger.

If you stream like that, you're really going to have major problems and indeed the HDD causes this but this isn't the only "bottleneck" but your uploadspeed will also be a bottleneck.

What I'm trying to say is, Fraps uses a junk codec and you can't tweak it more.

Dxtory would allow you to record at 1000Kbps (which you can change to whatever you like) which is just nothing for your HDD at all neither for your uploadspeed for twitch. Also Dxtory is less laggy than Fraps due to being better multithreaded.

As I said before dxtory allows to use w/e codec you want, but some codecs have a better algoritm which just means that they can provide the same quality at a lower bitrate (Kbps).

were talking about streaming, not local recording by the way