[Legacy] OBS x264 settings for nearly uncompressed and lossless game capture with no CPU/fps impact
95See 2018 update: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7SLATkvYp0
OBS for local recording at 1080p 60 fps 10-300 mbps
how to record gameplay 60 fps 1080p
how to capture 60 fps
60 fps gameplay capture
x264’s settings I change is a few:
profile, preset and quantization parameter (qp).
Profile options from faster to slower:
baseline; main; high; high10; high422; high444.
Baseline, the profile of my choice, is optimized for fast encoding and decoding (playback) on low-cost applications/devices. YouTube’s maximum is ‘high’ profile.
Preset options from faster to slower:
ultrafast; superfast; veryfast; faster; fast; medium; slow; slower; veryslow; placebo.
Ultrafast profile is using more disk space, but has nearly zero CPU/fps impact. Preset option does not affect video quality.
QP is similar to CRF. It tries to make the video bitrate as low as possible for a set quality level, no matter if it’s high resolution or low, simple or complicated. QP can be set between 0 and 51, where lower values would result in better quality. 6 is usually considered ‘lossless’, 16-19 is ‘awesome’, and 20-24 is good.
Custom x264 Encoder Settings:
For YouTube upload I use:
profile=baseline preset=ultrafast qp=16
This gives me 10-30 Mbps in low action video and up to 160 Mbps in action games at 1080p60.
For editing I sometimes use:
profile=baseline preset=ultrafast qp=6
This setting can give 45 Mbps in simple and 300 Mbps in complex video.
OBS also allows NVENC and Intel Quick Sync for encoding. I tried both.
NVENC’s strong side is that it’s almost not impacting CPU/fps. Some games though (Half-Life 2 in my experience) can use a video card in such manner that it will start to skip frames in encoded video, meanwhile you can’t know it before you watch the results. This will never happen if you use CPU encoding.
Also NVENC’s video quality is not very high, at least with GTX 600 Series. GTX 700 series allows lossless NVENC profile but I haven’t tried it yet.
Intel Quick Sync is impacting CPU/fps at approximately the same rates as x264, but it is also bugged and can sometimes work incorrectly on my system. It also requires a virtual monitor, which is a drawback.
Notice 1. OBS produces 4:2:0 chroma subsampling files (it is also YouTube’s maximum for color), which results in ~75% color information loss and smaller file size. This loss is mostly noticeable with small objects and transition from one color to another and considered acceptable.
This way, if you decide to compare your resulting video with a game screenshot, you should be aware that small objects look different because of chroma subsampling and not necessarily because of bad video quality.
Notice 2. Web players based on HTML5 and Adobe Flash most of the time hang if you playback 1080p 60 fps in fullscreen mode. You can try mini-mode or download the video with software like jDownloader.
PC, FullHD 60 fps, 1080p60. Walkthroughs, gameplays, let's plays. High quality, good picture. i7 3770K, GTX 660
See my playlists here: https://www.youtube.com/user/SteadyEddy111/playlists