What's the right upgrade?

SushiKishi

New Member
I'm currently on a dual-PC setup. The specs on my stream PC are:
CPU: Intel Core I5-9600K -- the CPU socket is 1151LGA
GPU: GeForce GTX 1660 Ti
Memory: 32GB; CPU-Z says it's 4000MHZ Unicore Frequency and 1500 DRAM Frequency, and WIndows Task Manager says its 3000MHZ "speed"

OBS Output settings are:
Bitrate: 5000
Video Encoder: Hardware NVENC H.264, P5/Slow Quality

And some screenshots of the local record and YouTube VOD are here: https://imgur.com/a/BaLSgUr

My Stream PC is running OBS (streaming and local record), but since I'm a vTuber it's also running vTube Studio and vBridger to make the model move. And I feel like, even if I'm playing a retro game, I see the "encoding overloaded" pop up at 1080p60, but not constantly. Even if I play something like SF6 or FF14, I don't see it constantly but it does pop up, and I feel like the video stream itself could look better.

I've tried offloading the avatar apps to the game PC, and it made Street Fighter 6 start to stutter a bit trying to run all of those at 60FPS at the same time. This is with an entire sample size of about five minutes, but the hitching in the game was pretty noticeable in offline play.

I feel the stream PC has almost enough beef under the hood to get the job done but I don't know if I'm just at the point where it's gonna look how it's gonna look. WHen watching back the streams I did notice a couple of places where the livestream hitched, and since I'm not dropping network frames my guess is that it's the computer chugging. I ran the log from my last longer stream through the analyzer and got 0.2% encoding lag and it pointed to the GPU -- but only the last hour of that four-hour stream was with the Stream PC carrying the load I described above, for the rest of the time I offloaded everything but OBS to the game PC while playing a very light game. For a roughly one-hour stream this morning at 900p60, the analyzer spit out 0.1% reach renderer and encoding lag.

When I watch the online VODs, the stream just always seems to look fuzzy and a little, I dunno, crap? The local recordings look much sharper! I took some screenshots from a 1080p60 stream playing SF6 and put the link above. I don't know if I think it looks bad because I just assume if I'm doing it, it must suck, or if it looks bad because it really does look bad. This isn't a whine about not really having viewers, but my entire question might be resolved by someone slapping me on the back and telling me it looks fine I'm stressin' over nothing.

I'm not sure if I should:

A) Upgrade the CPU and GPU
--I did a little googling, and it looks like a nice upgrade without an unlimited budget is a 3060 not-TI (here) and an I7-12700KF (here), for a total of about $500 which definitely means I'm breaking it up over the next three months at least.

B) Pick up one of these "mini PCs," or an El Cheapo Amazon Special PC that at least has a dedicated GPU, and use an unheard of three-PC setup and then promptly smash my head into the wall. On its own the third PC isn't super powerful but it should be able to either run the vTuber software 60FPS on its own and spit out NDI, or handle OBS at 1080p60, input the Elgato Capture Card + vTuber NDI, and do the streaming. The priciest thing in this category I picked out is about $260 (here)

C) Just sit pat -- there's really not a lot of room for improvement for my budget ($500+ for a non-income for-fun low-viewer-count hobby is a lot), or there's something else I can do to make it prettier.
 
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