If you’ve got the new Ryzen 5 3600X or have been on the fence about it - I’ve got some
solid information here which should make your decision easier or help you optimize your
streaming setup.
Many of you have asked for a review, many have asked for a streaming optimization guide
and this clip that you guys keep sending me….
[GN+Jayz2cents clip]
Doesn’t really give me much of a choice, now does it?
Let’s jump in after a word from this video’s sponsor.
[intro/ad spot]
I’m EposVox and
welcome back to StreamGuides - your number one resource for optimizing your live streams
and going live.
In this video, I’ll be walking you through how the AMD Ryzen 5 3600X 6-core CPU performs
for live streaming with OBS Studio, as well as some optimizations for you to keep in mind.
If you’re looking for this info on the higher end 3700x and 3900x CPUs from AMD, those videos
are coming soon, so get subscribed and stay tuned.
I also, you know, have a cool website coming soon for this project.
You’re going to like it.
Methodology My tests were done on this Ryzen 3600X CPU
borrowed from Wendell over at Level1Techs installed in the ASRock Taichi X570 motherboard,
part of AMD’s press kit, with 32GB of RAM running at 3200MHz, with the Infinity Fabric
clock set to match.
I have turned PBO on in the BIOS - this is a small kind of auto overclock setting that
helps Ryzen’s performance a little with no real work required on your part.
I have my founder’s edition RTX 2080 graphics card to run the games.
Oh yeah, and to cool this bad boy I’m using the new Noctua NH-U12S 120mm cooler that they
sent me for review.
I wasn’t sure what to expect from these tiny coolers, but MAN it’s small, it’s
quiet, and the CPU never got above 45C in ANY of my testing… what more could you ask
for?
I’ve been a fan of the NH-D15 and D14 series for years, so it’s nice to see the more
reasonably-sized coolers perform well, too.
For my performance tests, I set up OBS with either a 720p or 1080p canvas, and primarily
tested at 6mbps at 1080p using X264 encoder on Fast, Medium, and Slow CPU Usage Presets,
as well as my “secret sauce” settings - covered in this video here - and then at
720p on Slow and Slow with my “secret sauce” settings.
The games are running fullscreen at 2560x1440 at a 120hz refresh rate - this is a “median”
format of people who come to me asking for help, BUT is higher resolution that what most
streamers are actually using.
The most common resolution is 1080p or similar.
BUT the advantage here is that by validating performance based on running at 1440p, anyone
running lower than this will have similar or even better results.
BUT this is where many streaming reviews fall short.
I didn’t JUST include gameplay in my OBS scene.
Very few people out there are streaming with only gameplay footage showing, and those who
do aren’t likely to net many followers while doing so.
Instead, I also added on a facecam, using this AVerMedia PW313 live stream webcam - review
soon - on default settings, and my usual animated webcam frame and recent follower or tipper
feed bars.
These are on a loop and everything is consistent between tests.
I didn’t bother with the text or anything else - I felt like this was a good enough
scene to more closely simulate a proper streaming setup.
Too many people test their streams with just gameplay and then switch to a full layout
and performance is WAY different.
This fixes that.
Also, while this is a Windows image made specifically for this benchmarking purpose, I didn’t
want to keep it totally vanilla, as that’s not representative of streaming setups either.
So I had the Stream Deck running w/ HWInfo graphs and controls for my benchmarking process
as well as the GoXLR app and services for audio.
General Results Before we get started, I wanted to note that
these test results and optimizations are for low bitrate streaming situations.
If you’re just recording, you can use a high bitrate or a CRF or CQP value and not
have to worry about which CPU Usage Preset is being used at all, so it’s a non-issue.
Generally speaking, this CPU is a MONSTER.
For $200 to $250, you can game and stream to your heart’s content.
I… am seriously impressed.
This CPU can stream every game I tested at 720p 60fps on Slow, Medium, and my “secret
sauce” settings on Slow with 0 frames dropped whatsoever.
Seriously.
Every single one.
With minimal impact on how your gameplay feels, too!
It’s… truly insane.
1080p60 gives trouble on Medium for a lot of games - especially when it comes down to
your actual game’s frame pacing and your enjoyment of the game, and Slow at 1080p is
not possible on any game I tested, but I believe 720p is the way to go anyway.
If you’re feeling disappointed and confused as to why I would celebrate 720p, the limited
bitrates required for streaming to Twitch - and that most people can actually stream
at - are nowhere near high enough for good-looking 1080p60 in most fast-paced games, but can
be good for 720p, especially with my special tweaks.
Granted the 10megabit per second cap for Mixer is a little more reasonable for 1080p60, but
even still, that’s hard for most average internet connections to stream.
As far as the X264 Slow conversation goes, I have a whole video essay addressing that
here, linked in the video description.
X264’s CPU Usage Presets are just that - presets.
They’re pre-configured groups of settings of X264, none of them designed or optimized
for game streaming in particular, and the ones like Slow are not at all intended to
be run in realtime live environments in the first place.
As you can see in some of these tests going from Medium where there’s literally no dropped
frames at all, to Slow where it can drop between 50 and 90% of frames….
Yeah.
The difficulty curve of pushing each CPU preset is not at all linear.
My recommendation is to avoid slow in general, BUT if you must, the Ryzen 5 3600X (and mostly
the 3600, too) can stream Slow at 720p in most games.
I do, seriously, urge you to use Medium with my special sauce settings, which pull some
of the quality gain flags from Slow without many of the performance-costing ones.
GPU Allocation Something that I was constantly battling up
against - something I have run into for years and have a salty FAQ rant-style video about
here, linked below - is the issue of limited GPU resources.
BUT I did finally utilize and confirm a specific fix - which is obvious and I’ve suggested
before - that made this setup work here.
To sum it up briefly: You only have a finite amount of processing power on your graphics
card, just like your processor.
This amount of power is used both by your game that you’re playing and OBS itself.
OBS uses the same processing power as your games to composite and render your scene that
it streams.
This is inherent to how OBS works, and cannot be avoided.
To “remove” this would be to prevent you from at all being able to use anything but
your gameplay as a source and change the scale of it, etc.
Windows 10 has typically done a bad job of managing this and allowing programs to compete
with one another.
So while your game is using 80%+ of your graphics card and OBS starts to try to claim another
20% or more, they both suffer, but OBS’s performance is the most problematic.
You start to lose frames without any obvious reason why.
In the Windows 10 1903 update, this situation has improved quite a bit for those gaming
at 1080p.
Enabling Game Mode, Windows is now able to allow OBS to reserve the resources it needs
and generally this is not a problem.
At 1440p high refresh rate, and at 4K, however, this is still an issue.
It’s being worked on, but slowly.
The obvious fixes are to reduce your GPU usage - so lowering game settings or resolution,
limiting your game’s frame rate to 60 or 120, lowering your OBS canvas to 720p, and
so on.
However for some games, like Apex Legends in my case, this isn’t enough.
Especially given that my monitors are of mis-matched refresh rates.
The monitor I’m gaming on is at 120hz, the one I’m monitoring OBS on is 60hz.
This meant that even though I could get Apex Legends down to using only 50% of the GPU
on its own, having OBS running was pushing that to 100% and then losing frames!
There is a confirmed bug in the way the Windows DWM handles different refresh rates when OBS’s
preview is going that causes this usage to go out of control and cause performance problems.
So the saving grace for this setup was disabling the preview.
This… sucks, as I regularly monitor the preview while I’m live streaming, but a
necessary evil.
That being said, I still had to frame cap certain games, too.
We’ll touch on this next.
Again, none of this really has anything to do with the CPU specifically - but I’ve
made recommendations before and then people run into these GPU-limited scenarios and think
the processor is the problem.
This is something you have to deal with whether you’re on the 3600X, 3900X, or my 18-core
i9-7980XE.
It’s… fun.
Game-Specific Let’s talk about a couple game-specific
optimizations and thoughts for a minute.
Black Ops 4 and Minecraft were both easy to stream at 1080p60 up to Medium, and were unstreamable
at Slow.
My “secret sauce” settings at 1080p60 Medium work, too!
As they do at 720p60 Slow.
Apex Legends, I had to frame cap all the way down to 60.
You determine this by seeing what frame rate you can guarantee your game will run at.
Apex was not holding a locked 120fps, which means it’s still using my full GPU trying
to hit that target, but was always above 60, by a long shot, so I had to cap 60 to limit
performance enough to make OBS usable.
You could, of course, choose something weird and higher like 80 or 90, but that gets complicated.
Streaming at 1080p60, frame pacing was a tad annoying at Medium - meaning while you’re
not dropping frames in the stream, your game framerate and render times are bouncing around
sporadically, increasing input lag and making the game feel and look jerky.
This isn’t good.
If you’re set on doing 1080p streaming, I’d stick to Fast.
Otherwise, it can stream at 720p60 Slow with my secret sauce settings with no issues.
Ehhh I’m calling the “secret sauce” settings the “Vox Config” from now on.
Using the “Vox Config” at 1080p60 Medium had pretty meh frame pacing, I’d still stick
to fast, but my teammate and I did come in second place!
I’m going to blame the loss on the jerkiness affecting my aim.
Totally.
Fortnite - can you believe I actually PLAYED Fortnite for this? - again needs capped to
60fps.
It was alright at 1080p60 up to medium, but again, Slow or Vox Config at 720p is definitely
the best results here.
[mech clip] Tekken 7 is pretty tough to run and stream.
1080p60 was mostly a no-go, even at Medium graphics settings in-game, even on Fast and
Medium there was a little too much hitching and poor frame-pacing to be acceptable for
frame-timed fighting games.
720p is the way to go here, no issues again.
Or maybe just 1080p Faster.
But stick to 720p.
Devil May Cry 5 actually ran fine at 1080p60 Medium, but there was some weird hitching
during the in-engine cutscenes.
Was fine and smooth otherwise.
Rocket League ran great up to 1080p60 Medium.
720p was flawless.
PUBG was… really tough.
The impact on your framerate compared to not recording at all is MASSIVE.
I had insane frame pacing issues and even render lag still cropping up on most of my
tests - I 100% recommend capping your framerate to 60fps (my 2080 only even runs it at like
90fps most of the time anyway if I recall correctly) and streaming at 720p60 on Medium
or Fast.
Ouch.
CSGO again, I had terrible frame pacing issues streaming at 1080p60 even on Fast, but 720p60
even on Slow with my VoxConfig was perfectly fine.
Similar story in Battalion 1944 and Destiny 2.
Bad frame pacing at 1080p60 Medium, perfectly fine at 720p60 Slow with Vox Config.
Overwatch… ooh boy this is the game that sent me down the GPU Allocation Issue rabbit
hole starting in 2017.
It is very CPU reliant for smooth performance and I could not get smooth frame pacing while
frame-capped to 60 and dropped down to Faster preset at 1080p60.
It was bad, and nearly unplayable on Medium.
But 720p60 Slow VoxConfig?
Smooth.
UGH.
It’s also worth noting here that if you want to stream and record at the same time,
unless you’re just saving a local copy of your stream feed using the “use stream encoder”
option at the exact same settings, I always recommend leveraging GPU encoding for the
recording side.
Set it to a CQP of 14 or 18 and let it do its thing.
Running dual CPU encoders is way too intense, even for this CPU, and not worth it.
Dual PC What if you want to use your 3600 rig as a
dedicated streaming PC for streaming external sources such as cameras, game consoles or
gaming PCs via capture cards or NDI?
Good news: The Ryzen 5 3600 is great at this, too!
The CPU and chipset have enough PCIe lanes that you could see as many as 4 PCIe capture
cards added to the system - or more, depending on your motherboard, plus USB devices - which
is awesome.
Performance-wise, you still can’t stream at 1080p60 on Slow - it still fails to encode…
most of the frames.
But 1080p60 Medium goes alright in my testing, though adding my VoxConfig on top of Medium
is still a tad too much for it.
Only dropped 2.4% of frames during a test encode, but it was dropping them at a regular
enough interval that I wouldn’t recommend it.
However, once again, 720p60 even with the VoxConfig settings is perfectly fine.
Also, I was playing from the preview here, so be nice.
This is mostly due to the thread count.
12 threads isn’t quite enough to push 1080p on Slow, but is for 720p.
Gee, I wonder what resolution I recommend streaming at? :P
Also, I did quite a few hours of Discord Go Live streaming on this rig, too!
We’ll be covering that in an upcoming video, though.
Conclusion I wanted to cover some of the specific optimizations
I had to use to make sure you had the tools available to make this CPU work for your stream,
but you get the idea.
Stream with a 720p60, Medium or VoxConfig setup, frame cap and disable previews as needed
to balance your GPU performance, and enjoy chasing that Twitch or Mixer partnership with
this BEAST of a value CPU.
It’s not the cheapest chip out there, but the performance value you’re getting for
your dollar is INSANE!
And you can even pair it with a cheaper B450 motherboard as long as it has good VRM cooling!
I recommend the MSI B450M Gaming Plus if you need a mATX board, specifically, or the Gigabyte
B450 Aorus ELITE for full-size ATX if you want cheaper boards.
Both are under $100.
This ASRock Taichi is pretty solid on the X570 side, too.
I hope this answers most of the questions you may have about the Ryzen 5 3600 for streaming.
If you have more, consider joining our inner circle on Floatplane, where you get a special
chat channel in our Discord server, behind the scenes content and early access to videos
just like this one.
Like the video, subscribe, do all the normal social things, and keep an eye out for some
more exciting announcements from StreamGuides.
I’m EposVox, and I’ll see you next time.