What hardware is necessary for streaming games to twitch?

Or any other streaming service. This has been difficult to research because when searching anything "stream" related its nothing but watching netflix-type video and games content streaming as a service.

What I want to do specifically is be able to stream video of games from my pc for an extra life event or any number of occasions. However, as well as every game runs on any number of machines I've tested, streaming slows all of them to a crawl. Does piping out video put stress on memory? Video memory? CPU power? Do I need a separate device to properly take the burden of processing video? All of the above? Its surprisingly difficult to find references and learn exactly what to upgrade hardware-wise.

Most software questions are more than accounted for here and here.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Putting out a stream mostly puts pressure on the CPU (and your internet upload of course). Getting a seperate device to deal with the streaming is common and recommended, I think.

Like the Avermedia Live Gamer HD, for example. But there's a ton of alternatives.

Note: A capture card doesn't fully take the load off your PC, though. So a lot of people have dedicated PC's to deal with the stream. Which is even more recommended, but not necessary.

@christoffer: Oh is that so? I happen to have a second pc able to take the load! Do you have any references on how to go about that?

Currently looking into these:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDPbA5O9THA

http://www.helping-squad.com/two-pc-streaming-or-recording-without-a-capturecard/

https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/streaming-and-recording-setups-an-overview.2021/

@verysexypotato: Well, those looks like pretty good references to start out with. In the end it's always a lot of experimenting and tweaking but I think you'll get the hang of it quickly. It was years ago I actually learned anything about streaming so I don't know if the process is much more streamlined these days, so I can't give you any better references myself.

I recently read that Newtek will release a Tricaster Mini soon. Probably because of the high demand of professional, affordable and easy live-streaming. Still about $7000 though ;)

But I think you're good with a dual-PC setup for a while. Sorry I can't help you more

Firstly disregard anybody who says you need an i7 to stream on Twitch while playing games, I am not sure why so many believe that to be the case, it's nonsense!

You will want an i5 or i7 quad core from recent years (Sandy Bridge or later) but even the old ones (2009 first batches) are still relevant. These are basically your typical go-to PC CPUs because AMD haven't been putting out very good CPUs, avoid them because a good Intel CPU will last you over 4 years with ease, I have seen people buy budget AMDs (that were only $60 cheaper than Intels) and had to upgrade them within 3 years, the Intels kept on going fine.

The most important thing is having your settings adjusted properly in OBS. If you use a Nvidia card you can use Nvidia's own encoder for streaming (through OBS) which takes load away from the CPU. Fortunately the majority of games will leave you with CPU power to spare because CPUs are rarely fully stressed, so streaming just using CPU encoding should be fine if you're not trying to put out 4k.

It all depends on what quality you want to stream at. Full HD will certainly use up quite a lot of CPU and GPU power, but if you scale it down (OBS has a built in downscaler you can enable) you can stream with little performance loss from a $200 laptop.

Hell, people have been streaming games for over a decade at this point, so in practice you don't even need a multicore CPU as long as you don't stream at full quality and maybe lower the in-game graphics a bit.

Just try various settings in both OBS and the game until you find something that works.