While the title says Streamlabs OBS settings, it can be used for others too like OBS Studio and such.

I started live streaming about year ago or more and was not having good video quality when I solely increased the bitrate and resolution of video. I increased it because I had got a better internet now.

There was no problem with default settings of Streamlabs OBS for 720p 30fps when I had low bandwidth internet, but now I wanted to do live streaming at 1080p 60fps and had a lot of problem fixing pixilation, blurriness. I started researching and thought the problem lied in assigning too much bitrate. I was streaming 1080p 60fps at 12,000 kbps bitrate. You can see my video how it was then:

All that pixilation was just way off charts, but one point that could be noted was that when I stopped moving in the game the pixilation would settle. From that I could conclude that action games probably needed some different settings. Though leaving aside actions, if we are talking about simple movements that's in almost every game one or the other way.

Now after that, I had to decrease the bitrate, so after lots of tests on different streams, I settled on 8000kbps, the stream had less pixilation compared to before but still there were lots of it especially when there was intense action going on screen.

This was the result for 1080p 60fps 8000kbps:

Different sites give different info (obviously) when searching on google, I went through many of them, here are some of the most helpful:
https://manycam.com/blog/best-live-streaming-settings/

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2853702?hl=en

https://support.restream.io/en/articles/73108-best-settings

I use restream for streaming to multiple platforms, it's costly but I can afford it, atleast for now.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/guides/broadcasting-guide/

Now lets break things to important points for live streaming

Which Encoder to choose?

We or atleast I, normally have 3 settings I see in my Streamlabs OBS for encoder.

• Software (x264)
• Hardware (NVENC)
• Hardware (NVENC) (new)

Software (x264)

This encoder which is also called AVC (Advanced Video Coding) basically completely relies on CPU. It usually uses 30% to 40% of CPU for 720p and 40% to 60% CPU for 1080p. Forget about it if you are talking about 60fps it burns your CPU, not literally but the cooler fans will run at their highest speeds possible, so if you are doing live stream on a laptop with no constant external cooling, unless you are on supercomputer forget about live streaming using this encoder. Even desktop CPU becomes hot with this encoder.

With the recent games becoming larger in size proportional to CPU and GPU requirements this encoder definitely can't be used. Because the game requires lots CPU by itself. If you ask me, I would rather prioritize giving CPU to the game rather than live streaming.

Except how it drinks on your CPU cores/threads it is in no way inferior to Hardware encoder for encoding videos, rather Software encoder does better job if we are purely talking about video encoding, as normally hardware is not considered to do better jobs at video encoding.

The main difference would be the file size, if you have a set of settings for the encoder and run it through both software and hardware encoder you will see that software encoded outputs will have smaller file size and yet good video quality compared to Hardware encoders. Hardware encoders files size usually go up to 1.2 to 2 times the software encoder output size. So if you use this you'll probably end up saving some of your bandwidth.

But there is an highly experimental option that will allow you to make this encoder use a bit of GPU too for live streaming to reduce CPU usage.

In the x264 options box all you have to do is add "opencl=true" (of course don't include the double quotes when pasting it there).

But as I said this is an highly experimental feature. According to an online thread it might break or even worsen things. Don't know what will worsen specifically.

Hardware (NVENC) or Hardware (NVENC) (new):

New GeForce-Optimized OBS and RTX Encoder Enables Pro-Quality Broadcasting, you can read more about it here:
https://www.nvidia.com/en-in/geforce/news/geforce-rtx-streaming/

Remember that this is the same x264 AVC encoder, but the difference is that it mainly uses GPU for encoding, but compared to how software encoder uses around 50% of CPU, NVENC uses about 10% to 30% of GPU and 1% to 4% of CPU. Amazing.

If you have GPU models like Nvidia RTX 30 (or any RTX 20 equivalent) or higher series you can live stream all you want at the highest resolution and fps you can afford to and not care about anything else.

I would definitely choose this for live streaming any game.