The Problem
When you stream with a game capture card you are going to put a cap on your framerate. Unfortunately this is one of the downsides of using a capture card.
The Solution
What we are going to do here is stream the unencoded video output from one computer to the other over Ethernet – this will allow the other one to encode and stream the video.
This means more frames and no lag – especially for FPS shooters that require 0 lag!
Once you set this up you will be able to stream your gameplay while you view 144hz+ framerates.
It will also take some of the work off of your CPU for your gaming PC.
What you will need
- A PC that you want to stream from.
- A PC that you want to game from.
- A connection between the two PCs which can be accomplished by:
- Connect the two computers to the same router
- Connecting the two PCs a switch which is then connected to a router
- Directly plug the computers into each other with (either a regular either cable or a crossover ethernet cable – make sure to check your motherboard!)
Preparation – for each of your PCs:
- Download and install Open Broadcast Software (OBS) Studio.
- Go to https://ndi.tv/tools/ then download and install the software.
- Get the Open Broadcast Software for NDI. This can be found as a plugin here.
On gaming PC
- Open OBS and go to Tools > NDI Output settings
- Make sure the ‘Main Output’ is checked and name the PC > click ‘Okay’
On your streaming PC
- Boot up OBS
- Select add source and select ‘NDI source’ – here you are able to add your gaming PC as a source
- Set up your scenes and you are ready to go live.
Now that you are able to run a dual PC setup without a capture card – you have the ability to let your gaming PC do all the heavy lifting for the game while the streaming PC will just send the stream to Twitch.
