Which screen to buy (UHD vs FHD) for streaming only application windows ?

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kafka321

New Member
I am in the process of selecting a laptop with a good GPU with RDX, RAM, and CPU, for the objective (among others) to stream high quality content with OBS. The content will always be only part of my screen: a window of a particular application. My idea was to get a very high resolution screen (UHD: [3 840 x 2 160]) so that to have up to 4 windows per screen at 1920 x 1080, and switch between windows during the streaming (showing only one window at a time, which would appear full screen to the "watcher").

Is that a good idea or would it be better to have a screen with smaller resolution, i.e. FHD [1 920 x 1 080] ?

For the first UHD setup, from what i understand i would need to setup Base resolution to "1920 x 1080" and same for the output to optimize the streaming. Or maybe even "1920 x 1080" for Base and "1080 x 720" for output.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
 
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kafka321

New Member
Hi, thank you the reply but i am a bit confused why you say that it would be too small and nobody would see anything.

I am not sure you understood what i am doing. First I am not streaming a game , i am showing webpages, a terminal, etc, and i have to use a laptop. To understand the setup, imagine that for the rainbow image below, i am scaling it to the full screen (so stretching the red rectangle so that it covers the whole screen). Then watchers will see this rainbow screen at the full output resolution. And an output of 1920 x 1080 is fine, because the size of the window is 1920 x 1080 anyway: watchers will see everything and all the details, even small text.

1-20.png


As i mentioned, i would record only one window, which would appear full size to the watcher. So what would be the problem with having 4 windows at 1920 x 1080, setting the "Base resolution" and the "output resolution" to 1920 x 1080 and only showing one window at a time which appears fullscreen to the watcher ?

So would it be a good solution to have a UHD screen with 4 windows at 1920 x 1080 and showing one at a time full screen with OBS by setting the "Base resolution" and "Output resolution" to 1920 x 1080 ? Or would that create issues somehow and a FHD screen [1 920 x 1 080] be better for some reasons ?

Any suggestion / advice would be greatly appreciated.
 
FerretBomb

FerretBomb

Active Member
A 4K monitor split up into quadrants would work just fine. It should cause no issues, aside from manually/programmatically getting each of the windows scaled to precisely 1920x1080. If they aren't, you'd probably have a little overscan or underscan, with your canvas set to 1080p.
Even if you WERE downscaling something fullscreen, from 2160p you'd have a full-integer 2:1 divisor, and maintain more image quality than a partial (1440p to 1080p) would.

I think cyclemat may have misunderstood, and thinks you want to show all four 1080p sources at once, downscaling full-frame 4K->1080p, instead of what you'd described; being able to see all four on your monitor, but only showing one 1080p window at a time on your 1080p canvas in OBS (regardless of output downscale from there).

Again, yes, this should work just fine. I do similar when streaming at native 720p; play in a 720p window, and have that fill my canvas so I have 1:1 pixel accuracy, meaning no scaling quality loss.
 
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