Is OBS streaming killing your framerates?

OBS Studio (Open Broadcaster Software) is a great, free tool for managing the video that’s coming off your PC. I use it myself to record videos for PCWorld’s YouTube channel and sometimes just for video meetings to adjust some settings. It’s a popular choice for game streamers who need to manage video for Twitch and YouTube. But does it come with a performance hit?

That’s what Will Smith decided to investigate. Specifically, we’re talking about running OBS in the background of a game on a single-system setup — a popular choice, since it’s simpler and much, much cheaper than a more old-fashioned dual-PC approach. Will ran game benchmarks without OBS running, then with OBS on different setups to see what kind of effect it had on your game’s framerates.

Long story short: Across a variety of hardware setups with the hugely powerful RTX 5090, from mid-range to high-powered CPUs, you’re going to see a predictable drop of about 10-15 percent while running an OBS stream, even without other tools. That’s a pretty substantial hit. And with an older or less-powerful card, which the vast majority of PC gamers have, you can expect a bigger ding to your framerate.

It’s a much bigger hit to performance than Will was expecting. It’s enough that you might consider running a dedicated stream manager PC, at least if you happen to have one available — an older gaming desktop build, for example. That’s especially true if you’re trying to play competitive online games. But if you’re setting up a streaming system right now, when PC hardware has never been more expensive, it might be worth the sacrifice.

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