Jack's Hardware - The OBS 1 1/2 System Solution

Community Blog
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So, I cover in this 36 minute video what @eposvox missed in his 5 hour course on OBS.

I go into how to do this on Windows and Linux.

Unfortunately, Looking Glass did not make it into this video, as I’m waiting on “Beta 1” to make a video on Looking Glass once it’s more feature complete and backwards compatible.

Edit:

So it has come to my attention there’s confusion to dedicating a NVENC encode to a specific GPU.

On Windows, this is not all that this process is doing. By launching OBS on a secondary GPU, it’s canvas is also rendered on the secondary GPU. The canvas composites the game capture with other elements like browser sources, your webcam, and text elements. BOTH the canvas and NVENC are dedicated to a secondary GPU with this method.

The Linux GPU passthrough method also does the same thing, where the host GPU is the only one dealing with the OBS canvas and NVENC, and the capture card captures the output of the GPU being used in the GPU passthrough VM.

Hope this clears up any confusion. It’s not just NVENC people!

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I’ve gotten responses so far saying:

  • But Shadowplay is better! OBS is dumb, Shadowplay master race!

  • Nobody streams with a single HEDT PC.

First, Shadowplay runs on NVFBC. OF COURSE it’s better because it’s proprietary. But it limits you to whatever’s available in GeForce Experience for customization.

Second, just outright saying dual system is the norm is like never breaking out of the box in terms of thinking about how to do things a different way. I want to let people know the option is there, so no need to beat it down to say “This is stupid, dual system is proven and is better” without trying it.

I’m a little bit disturbed that the mob mentality still applies to streaming methods to deny everything else and never give it a shot.

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So unfortunately the game capture solution for Windows does NOT work well for DX9 games, as it is wildly inefficient and slow. This is possibly what the OBS devs were referring to. You can try using the capture card solution for that, but if you need those frames, a DX9 competitive game requires dual system.